Pavel Braila

Pavel Braila, who originally wanted to become a chef, became an aritist via some roundabouts. As an amateur photographer he was commissioned to photograph the Carbon Art summer camp in the mid-1990s. This sparked his interest in contemporary art, a scene that was just beginning to develop in Moldova at the time.

Braila makes the current relationship between Eastern and Western Europe, and especially the geographical and political location of the small state of Moldova, which was only founded in 1991 between the European Union and the Eurasian Economic Union, the subject of his artistic works. In the film Shoes for Europe, for example, he documented how trains on the border between Moldova and Romania are adapted to the gauge of European train tracks in a process that takes several hours – and thus were made suitable for Europe.

Braila's videos, installations and interventions are ambiguous and humorous – in his most recent work BenzoKaraoke, he invited drivers to sing karaoke at a gas station. The better the performance, the cheaper the price of gasoline. At Wandersalon #16 in the Voices Karaoke Bar in Essen, the artist, who will be participating in Ruhr Ding: Klima in May and June 2020, will present the spectrum of his artistic work – followed by singing!

Pavel Braila *1971 lives and works in Chişinău, Moldova.