Decebal Scriba

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Decebal Scriba’s practice occupies a precise position within Romanian experimental art of the 1970s and 1980s, where conceptual inquiry, drawing, photography, performance, installation and video function as interconnected modes of analysis. Trained at the Nicolae Grigorescu Institute of Fine Arts in Bucharest, graduating in 1973, and later at ENSAD Paris in 1991, Scriba developed a body of work concerned with systems of representation, linguistic signs, spatial limits, repetition, gesture and the unstable status of memory. His participation in Situation and Concept at Atelier 35 in 1974, followed by Photography and Experimental Film, Space Object and Space Mirror, places his activity within the discreet but rigorous field of Romanian conceptual art under communism. Together with Nadina Scriba, he initiated House pARTy in Bucharest in 1987 and 1988, a private video document project that brought performance into a domestic and archival framework. After settling in France, his work has been reassessed through exhibitions at Victoria Art Center, Calina Gallery, Anca Poterașu Gallery, Salonul de Proiecte, Art Encounters Timișoara and Anne Sarah Bénichou, Paris. His works address visibility, concealment, the body, the object and the sign, using modest material procedures to produce a disciplined reflection on social space and artistic agency.