Bianca Mann

”The Night is Yours Alone” converted the former ice room of the Mogosoaia Palace (palace located near Bucharest) into a visual, auditory, and olfactory experience that transposed the viewer into a dream world. The installation is located in the basement, which emphasized its quiet and sober atmosphere. The audio recording in which some important dreams of the artist are told denotes the key of reading the installation: sleep is akin to a short death from which we wake up every day. The black pillows deepen the idea of immersion in another world and through this aspect, the theme of death is interrogated. The pillows become mortuary masks of the artist’s face.

The installation offers a visual narrative in which, the matter grows and descends, recomposing each time in another form. Thousands of faces (which are shrunken masks of the artist’s face) recover a new form following the natural process of degradation of matter.

The Blind Spot is a journey that begins with a mask - a self-cast of the artist's face in resin or in bronze, with eyes placidly shut towards the world and multiplied infinitely, like closed doors separating the external reality from the internal one. The unsettling result can evoke a complex reaction in the viewer, as the multitude of identities inhabiting Mann's sculptures penetrates the inner self of each individual.

The series of works ”Rorschach” had as a starting point the inkblot test (the personality test designed by Hermann Rorschach). The symmetrical two-dimensional images were modeled in clay by the artist and then transformed into three-dimensional objects. The works are modeled from hundreds of masks of different sizes. The masks are faces of the artist obtained from the mold taken from her face. These masks initially had a natural size and then were gradually diminished, until the details that defined the features of the faces were no longer recognizable. These amorphous images allow the viewer to find new meanings of the work, new identities, characteristics of its personality just as in the ink stains test, and the mask becomes a symbol of identity.

"When I ask myself what the mask is, I visualize heaps of masks, infinite in size, shape and arrangement in space. I feel that these masks are part of me but at the same time they are hostile to me, they suffocate me, they clarify me and they also confuse me. I chance mask after mask, being deceived by the illusion that some could be more transparent than others and that with some I could see the world more clearly than with others. ” - Bianca Mann