Collaborative project by Otilia Cadar and Liviu Coman
DERMA was an immersive installation and exhibition developed during NAG 2015 (Noaptea Albă a Galeriilor / White Night of the Galleries), one of Bucharest’s most important annual contemporary art events. The project took place at La 9spe, our artist-run space and studio, temporarily transformed into a complete exhibition environment under the extended spirit of 1Zi Art Space.
The project explored the threshold between consciousness and the unconscious through the metaphor of skin: derma as membrane, passage, and living border between realities. Visitors were invited to physically cross this boundary in order to enter what we imagined as the space where dreams are generated.
The transition between the two rooms of the exhibition was marked by a large portal-like installation created by Liviu Coman from intersecting wooden structures. To reach the main exhibition space, visitors had to pass through this dense architectural membrane while surrounded by an atmospheric sound composition and animated projections reflected directly onto the structure. The portal functioned simultaneously as sculpture, psychological threshold, and sensory filter.
Inside the second room, I presented the large-scale oil painting Creatorul Viselor (The Creator of Dreams, 255 x 165 cm), a figurative work depicting a solitary dream-generating presence.
Alongside the painting, I created approximately twenty small objects titled Dream Seeds: circular miniature paintings on paper placed between magnifying lenses and wrapped in gold leaf. These objects functioned as fragile dream fragments or preserved subconscious forms.
Visitors were encouraged to experience the works through handcrafted copper kaleidoscopes positioned throughout the space. Looking through them transformed the installations, paintings, and surrounding environment into shifting fragmented visions, altering perception in a way similar to the unstable logic of dreams themselves.
The exhibition environment was conceived as a total sensory experience in which painting, architecture, sound, light, projection, and viewer participation merged into a single immersive narrative. Throughout the night, visitors moved through the installation almost ritually, crossing the “skin” of the portal into a transformed perceptual space.
As with our previous projects, the entire exhibition was independently conceived, financed, designed, and produced by us.
For NAG 2015, DERMA became one of the widely recommended destinations of the night. Included on the official NAG map, the exhibition received a continuous flow of visitors who shared the experience with others throughout the city. The atmosphere created through sound, light, spatial transition, and altered perception transformed the small artist-run space into a deeply immersive environment that remained open until the closing event several days later.
The philosopher Mihai Novac described the exhibition as an exploration of the threshold between awareness and the unconscious, writing:
“The dream is the in-between between the epidermis of awareness and the dermis of the unconscious Self.”
Mediums: Oil painting, installation, sound, projection, interactive objects
Main painting: Creatorul Viselor (The Creator of Dreams), oil on canvas, 255 × 165 cm
Location: La 9spe / 1Zi Art Space, Bucharest
Event: NAG 2015 – Noaptea Albă a Galeriilor
Duration: Multi-day exhibition and immersive installation
Otilia Cadar. The Creator of Dreams, 2015. Oil on canvas, 255 x 165 cm.
Otilia Cadar. Details of The Creator of Dreams, 2015. Oil on canvas, 255 x 165 cm.
Otilia Cadar. Dreams Seeds, 2015. Acrylic inks on paper, magnifying glass, gold leaf, wood. 8 x 15 cm.
Documentation from the opening night of the exhibition DERMA, at the independent art space La 9spe, in Bucharest, 2015.
Photos are courtesy of Otilia Cadar, Adrian Citu, Mihaela Timpau and Adrian Chintoiu.
"As much appearance, so much being. Once I found out that something can be close only if brought to (it)self from afar. In other words, closeness is not so much a place situated in the most immediate proximity, as the finality of a movement towards (it)self proceeding from the depth of remoteness. On the other hand, any movement must take place, i.e. unfold, in a certain space, in a horizon which de-limitates it and, as such, a certain horizon of remoteness is a necessary condition for any closeness; paradoxically, thereby, that which is most proximate is, in its raw immediacy, the fremdest, precisely because it is not far enough to come closer to (it)self.
In the end, even by its etymological meaning, existence as ex-sistentia amounts to standing-out. Out of what and to whom? Out of (it)self and to (it)self. For awareness this entails that it must perpetually project itself in the remote depth of the unconscious if it is to actually become of (it)Self. For the Self this entails that it must perpetually project itself in the remote depth of awareness if it is to reach (it)Self. The dream is the resultant of these two movements.
Precisely thereby does the unconscious function as the Self-projective horizon of awareness – that is of the Self into awareness and of awareness into it(Self). In other words, just as the horizon lies in-between close and afar and precisely thereby de-limitates, the dream is the in-between between the epidermis of awareness and the dermis of the unconscious Self. Thereby it captures the projection of the Self into awareness and of awareness into the Self. The convergence of these two projections generates the existence."
[Mihai Novac, about Derma project.]
