b. 1977 Cluj, Romania

Ciprian Muresan’s videos are brief vignettes that make use of simple gestures to address weighty issues concerning violence, consumerism, and existential struggle. His video Choose (2005), for example, is a humorous investigation of the titular consumer imperative, in which a child is seen mixing Coke and Pepsi and happily drinking the result. This taste test, which is a mocking inversion of marketing ploys like the “Pepsi Challenge,” is made all the more trenchant by the fact that it is occurring in post-Soviet Romania, where American-style consumerism is a relatively recent import. However, like many of Muresan’s videos, the message of Choose remains tantalizingly ambiguous: what could be a statement about the illusion of choice offered by consumer culture, could just as easily be a magnanimous gesture of reconciliation, or a move that simply asks the question “Why choose when you can have it all?”