Created by Ioana Nemeș in 2010, The Healers series, of acrylic on paper, attempts to explore a “confusing area between religion and medicine in Romanian society,” as the artist stated in Religion in the Age of Digital Reproduction,[1] a text written by art critic Boris Groys. There are eight drawings that use visual codes from comic books to illustrate sequences from a tragic and highly publicised case that took place in 2005 at the Tanacu Monastery in Vaslui county, and which form, perhaps, Ioana Nemeș’s most atypical and surprising project. A nun diagnosed with schizophrenia lost her life following a so-called “exorcism” performed by a priest, assisted by four other nuns, after several days of being tied up and starved.
Ioana Nemeș’s ironic, even satirical discourse is socially engaged, critical of religious rituals and dogmas, bigots, and homophobes. The main character is not portrayed, has no power, is passive, a victim of the decisions of those around her: the church, the hospital, the press, the society. She suffers the consequences of replacing medicine with faith and pills with confession. “Americans have the shrink, Romanians have the church,” says one of the drawings, the one with the confession, which lists all the “deadly sins,” starting with self-love and ending with smoking. Ioana Nemeș wonders why, in our country, priests are more credible than psychologists and who actually heals souls. Why are the priest’s words accepted as immutable, and why is divinity accepted with such passivity? She wanted to draw attention to the way religious institutions deal with sin (with penance – “100 kneeling prayers per day and 80 days of fasting on bread and water only”), but also to the passing of responsibility for a life between doctors (it was later decided that she was already dead when they took her away in the ambulance – “It should be thoroughly checked beforehand,” it is forbidden to transport a corpse), the clergy (those who tied her to the bed and performed services for her), journalists (priests believe they are responsible for the “straying of mankind”), and the Orthodox religion itself, which recognizes miracle workers but not demon hunters.
The preoccupation with ethnography and folklore, with a reinterpretation of traditions and rituals, present in another series of works by Ioana Nemeș, Relics for the Afterfuture (Brown), also appears in The Healers through the song of the black bird, the only concrete indication of death: “World so bitter, let the fire thee burn / At e’en I’ll leave thee and ne’er return / That I’m going I’ll not say to thee / But I’m gone will be pain to see / That I have left, thee never tell / But in the village, plain I’ll not dwell.”
Having passed away prematurely, at only 32 years old, leaving behind the world she had transposed into art in the most diverse ways, Ioana Nemeș remains a remarkable artist, also through the honesty of her vision. This is precisely what makes her always relevant, one step ahead of her time. The Healers series anticipated the rise of the church’s power in society, spread through social media and used and exploited by certain extremist political parties as an alternative, as a means of resistance, under the guise of a “return to tradition.”
“All Times At Once,” the non-linear retrospective exhibition dedicated to Ioana Nemeș at the National Museum of Contemporary Art of Romania, includes, in addition to her best-known series, previously unseen works from the 2001–2011 period. From Monthly Evaluations to Letter to a Young Artist and the series of works with true visual poems, in which she encodes and translates nuances to associate them with emotions, to the autobiographical photographic documentation in The Wall Project, the exhibition offers a perspective on how Ioana Nemeș lived, analysed herself, and created at the intersection of constantly colliding times.
[1] Boris Groys, “Religion in the Age of Digital Reproduction,” in Boris Groys, Peter Weibel, eds., Medium Religion: Faith. Geopolitics. Art, ZKM—Centre for Art and Media Karlsruhe and Verlag der Buchhandlung Walter König, Köln, 2011, p. 25.
“Ioana Nemeș. All Times At Once.” Curator: Kilobase Bucharest [The National Museum of Contemporary Art, Bucharest, 12.12.2024–19.04.2025]
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Anda Docea
Anda Docea (b. 1979) is a journalist at Dilema magazine, where she writes the weekly column “Vîrsta medie” (The Middle Age), coordinates thematic dossiers, and conducts interviews and reports on ...