Pavel Braila

For his first exhibition at the Yvon Lambert gallery, Pavel Braila will present Shoes for Europe, 2002, Recalling Events, 2001 and the installation 33 Revolutions Per Minute or Music on Bones, 2001.

Shoes for Europe, 2002 : In the small frontier train station of Ungheni at the Moldavian-Romanian border, every train stops for three hours and is lifted two meters in the air to change wheels from Russian Gauge, used in Moldova, to Standard Gauge, used in Romania and Western Europe.

The trains’ laborious passage between East and West (which is illegally recorded by the artist) hosts a desire to gain access to Western Europe, with the prevailing notion of homogenisation to neutralize distance and place. Shot in digital video and presented for the first time at the Documenta 11 in 2002, Shoes for Europe projects the ever-present subject of how to locate and mediate subjectivity in times of fragmentation, dislocation and a new myth of trans-national identity.

Recalling Events, 2001 This performance took place at the Maastricht Jan Van Eyck Academy. The artist, dressed in black, lay on a blackboard writing down, in chalk, dates and sentences from his past that come to his mind. He erases all the information progressively, memories disappear as soon as they occur. At the end, the costume he wears is left behind as well as his erased past. 33 Revolutions Per Minute or Music on Bonnes, 2001.

The Western dreams of Soviet youth all meet in this installation and are symbolised by objects of this forbidden culture : T-shirts of rock bands, blue jeans, Western brands and censored music. Given the fact that they could not buy these consumer society objects, these dreams lead them to produce fakes.

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Pavel Braila - 33 Revolutions Per Minute