Viviana Druga

Viviana Druga is a Romanian ritualista based in Berlin who uses performance and photography and installation based work as her main forms of expression. She was born in Transylvania – Romania. Until the age of 12 she would visit together with her sister the grandparents living near the Carpathian mountains. Her childhood was influenced by the free life of the mountain area and the Christian – orthodox Mysticism brought in by her mother. Before she left Romania in 2008 she was predominantly interested in the social side of art, performing activist art actions in Bucharest such as infiltrating the international biennial, photographing herself with the president on the street while being dressed like a guerrilla, and convincing people to pose in their swimsuits in winter at a busy intersection where an off-limits park had been constructed.

Since she moved to Berlin, she has been investigating the personal, poetic side of performing, the new dimensions of reality and capturing that reality through photography – using art as a magical activity that can help the subject / audience discover new dimensions of oneself.

´Viviana Druga shares an interest in the resurgence of feminine aesthetic and knowledge forms through occult and ritual practices connected to nature sourced by her rural upbringings suffused with pagan culture. She combines a ‘bottom-up’ transformative poetics of lived experience and street politics with tactical aesthetic formalism and explores techniques of representation and reality from performance art to combine collective and individual ritual with transformative politics.´ Sam Williams.