IOANA MARIA SISEA

The new exhibition which is entitled ‘The Adventures of Bear Lache and his Friends’, will contain 36 ceramic sculptures which willrecount a very significant episode in Romania’s recent history when the dictator Ceausescu was rulingthe country.

Lache can still be seen on the wall of the Carpathian Hunting Museum in Romania,near Brasov. To this day he is the largest bear tohave been hunted.His trophy allowed Ceausescu to surpass his peer General Tito as the record holder and was, for a period, the essential preoccupationof a large portion of the Presidential Staff.

Ironically, there was nothing wild about Lache. He was bred for size from an unusually large male bear from the Romanian Circus anda captured female bear from the Carpathians. He was born in a zoo in Oradea, Romania and never left captivity until his selectionfor the tragicomic hunt. Meanwhile, his sister was a female animal star in Romanian cinema.

By the time he became an adult, Lache was the biggest bear in Romania,and was moved from the zoo to a restaurant in theRomanian alps where he became a domesticated play-thing of local tourists. As a docile giant, he developed a predilection for beerand pralines, which people would bring him on a daily basis in exchange for photos alongside him or even the chance to hug him.

One day, Lache vanished from the restaurant without trace or explanation. Ceausescu’s staff could finally be calm,having solved his diktatto surpass Tito’s record. Lache was executed in a fabricated hunt in the Carpathians. A huge but vain effort was made to make him explorethe forest but he refused to move from the spot he was left in. Ceausescu shot him unceremoniously from a close distance. Perhaps, theonly thing that was ‘real’ about the event was Laché‘s death.

The artist has said that, ‘what struck me most about this episode was the possibility of someone feeling a sense of victory from such anunequal,unfair interaction. Ceausescu with a huge rifle from a big distance killing an animal that could crush him in one second if theywere meeting face to face. Most of the time 3 or 4 other hunters would shoot the hunted animal before the dictator would get there toensure that Ceausescu would have a risk-free opportunity to kill something.’

After Ceausescu’s death the symbol of the revolution was the ‘drapelul cu gaurà’ the’Flag with a Hole’. This was, in realty, the previous flag of Romania with the Communist coat of arms cut from the centre. The coat of armsdepicted the wealth of Romania:Wheat,mountains, forest, the Danube, the sun and oil. This mutilated symbol is a perfect example ofhow Sisea’s work manages to communicate on various levels; she creates extraordinarily evocative and humorous sculptures which alsocontain a strong.political or social message.