Here Rests the Grass

Usually minimal in form, Miklós Onucsán’s conceptual interventions are concerned with daily shifts and, on a broader scale, with the cultural and social fractures generated by Eastern European politics, the collapse of utopias, and the shortcomings and ideals of past and actual political regimes, including his home country Romania’s transition from communism to a capitalist system in the 1990s. Embedded in a historical context, Onucsán’s works often bear titles that are more than mere names: they act as an entry point to the works’ conceptual frame and to their possible interpretations. Using language as a material, the artist engages with semantics, verbalism and syntax as a way to address and bring to the surface issues that go unnoticed in everyday life.

The photograph "Here Rests the Grass" depicts what its title desolately suggests, presenting the viewer with a bleak winter scene in a graveyard. In the centre of the image, a haystack stands among the population of tombstones. Reminiscent of an anonymous/non-monumental funerary marker, the haystack bears an inscription that reads “HERE RESTS THE GRASS 03.2008–06.2008”. The work outlines a space that seems at first sight external and foreign to the space of the living, where a different temporality rules supreme. However, filled with signs that are meant to define space and time, "Here Rests the Grass" reconnects past lives with present time, rethinking at the same time the customs and beliefs that surround death. Transitioning from a human-centred commemoration ritual into a non-discriminatory and non-hierarchical honouring of mortality, the photograph marks out the human and non-human unnameable losses that the earth bears.