Craftsmanship from the World Before ::Artisanal Skills in Ana Lupas’s Participatory Actions

Conceptual art has been thought of in recent decades as a movement that went beyond the Anglo-American framework and emerged in different parts of the world simultaneously. The role played by the exhibition Global Conceptualism in broadening the conceptual corpus cannot be overlooked. Held at the Queens Museum of Art in New York in 1999, this exhibition sought to present artistic practices from all continents, and was divided into several geographical sections, with invited curators entrusted to cover each region. The curator of the Eastern European section, László Beke, included work by Romanian artist Ana Lupas, who took advantage of Beke’s invitation to present photographs of Humid Installation from the early 1970s. Born in 1940 in Cluj, a city in Transylvania in western Romania, Lupas studied at the Ion Andreescu Institute of Fine Arts in Cluj from 1956 to 1962. Starting in the late 1960s, her work was regularly shown in national and international exhibitions and has become more widely known only recently. A broader public began to take an interest in her practice starting in 2016, when her installation The Solemn Process (1964–2008) entered the collections of the Tate Modern.