Iulia Bucureşteanu

My artistic practice consists of sculpture, photography, and printmaking, and the subjects I approach center around the home and the household.

I grew up in a culture where traditional gender roles are pursued. The way I experienced growing up and my migration from Romania have contributed to my ambivalent relationship with home and family. Therefore, I explore the domestic realm by looking at the objects within which describe one’s identity.

I document my daily domesticity by manipulating and losing control over the representation of the scenes and objects that I interact with. I use techniques that allow me to do so such as metal casting, and analog photography as means to illustrate selective memory and decay. The resulting objects often come out misshapen or glitched looking overused and disintegrated. I integrate my works into narratives that merge the past and the present of my households.

Overall, my work explores the complexity of the household and the role of women within it. I create a body of work that contemplates the relationship between domestic labor, identity, and family in an attempt to define the dynamics of the household and its hostility.

My graduation project explores this realm through personal archives. The objects and scenes I chose are separated from their domestic purpose and placed in a context where their value transitions. Through their objecthood, an obsolete digital camera, a PSP or the first generation of an iPod encapsulate a transitory period of time, while other objects such as the razor induce the idea of femininity through its’ gendered design. I assembled the series of belongings in a space that simulates a home environment and showcased them as artifacts that create the experience of personal history.