A Glimpse of Disconnection

Hovering above the city at dusk. A moment of transition, of movement and stillness. The light is razor sharp and emphasizes the city’s seeming abstraction. Like arriving by plane at night, the metropolis is illuminated by wonderful beams of light. Daily horrors disappear in the grand harmony of it all; an almost nostalgic postcard of cast away dreams and invisible complexities. Flying above, looking down, twisting one’s perspective, but still, no sight of the miners in the belly of the beast, of the decoys and destructions, the endless highways and political rot that greases the bowels of the city. The city can be a lonely place, full of obstacles and struggle, screams and far away songs. Parties one isn’t invited to. Connected by everything and everyone, many feel no connection to it at all. This disconnection may come from floating above but is perhaps more likely to arise from falling through the cracks below.

In Dani Gherca’s new series of photographs, “A Glimpse of Disconnection,” (2020 - ) the artist hovers between the clouds and the cracks. People are not visibly present as he circles the city’s skeleton by helicopter. It is a terrain of investigation he could continue for decades to come, soaring above as if in search for the space so absent in many earlier works. Everything looks calmer from the sky. Even military operations and images of day to day desperation. You can’t see the forest from the trees, but you can’t see it from the tunnels either. Can’t see it even from the window of an apartment block that penetrates the clouds. How to live in the city, to feel connected, when everything is just within your grasp and at the same time, totally out of reach? The search for belonging is at times a quest for space and Gherca explores the macro and the micro. The calm and the chaos. A question of perspective, of switching lenses. Marcel Proust wrote about this play of perception so splendidly: “the blade of grass quivering a few inches in front of our eyes as we lie on the hillside may conceal from us the vertiginous summit of a mountain if the latter is several miles away.”

In understanding the work of an artist, it’s more useful to look at a trajectory, at works in time, than at any single object or image. Gherca’s earlier works lead us around the city, into the monuments, tunnels and parks. Looking at these, it’s somehow evident how the sewers push him closer to the stars. The perspective changes, but the more emotional issues do not. His project “Park Portraits” (2014) somehow ties these other three bodies together. Shot in the Izvor Park, these images of middle-aged men speak towards a process of dehumanization. The park, not far from the Romanian Parliament, had become a spot for day laborers to seek work. Each of the six portraits in this series is a diptych. On one side we see the men. On the other, still-life portraiture of what the earnings from one’s last day’s work would afford him.

The buildings, the tunnels, the men in the park, all take us through turbulent transitions in the city. They testify to crumbling Communist dreams and the inconceivable inflation, unemployment and cultural shifts that followed the revolution and end of the regime. All of them glimpses of disconnection. The new work by that title, however, visibly distances from the artist’s immediate surroundings to consider broader questions of ongoing changes to the universal human condition. In these latest images, the city is no longer represented by architecture or people, but by its chilling glow and endless flow of data. The landscape appears as an illusion of connectivity, a glittering graphic representation of a ubiquitous motherboard abstracting emotion while projecting deepfake dreams.