The Children of Ceausescu

We are happy to announce the forthcoming exhibition Children of Ceausescu by photographer Kent Klich. The exhibition consists of images of Aids impacted children in Romanian orphanages taken by Klich on trips to Romania between 1994 and 1999. In 2004 Klich interviewed the surviving children who by then were teenagers. The video was made together with Brita Landoff for the Museum of World Culture exhibition " No Name Fever " which opened 2004.The works will be shown accompanied by a text written by Nobel Prize winning author Herta Müller-

"Five children per family, the law said. There was no contraception and abortion was a crime. As a result, there were the orphanages, which made the tragic headlines around the world after the dictator`s fall from power. They were for the children with no parents, whose mothers were in prison after an illegal abortion or dead at the hands of some back-street abortionist. Guilt-ridden, their fathers slid into alcoholism. Then the state would put the two or three surviving children into a an orphanage. The healthy ones were groomed for the secret police`s special units; the sick and disabled wasted away in their own filth – the flotsam of an uncaring insane society."

Excerpt from A good person is worth as much as a piece of bread by Herta Müller

Fresh milk, vitamins, and food were scarce, so institutions were told to treat the malnourished and anemic children with a fast-fix ”pick-me-up” consisting of transfusions of unscreened plasma. Compounding the issue, caseworkers often reused
vaccination needles on children, frequently using one needle on as many as ten children. The result: widespread AIDS throughout the child population in Romania.

Kent Klich b. 1952 Västerås, Sweden, lives and works in Copenhagen
Klich trained as a psychologist at the University of Gothenburg. He has exhibited widely and his recent work Gaza Photo Album opened at the Hasselblad Center in Gothenburg, 2010. He has also had solo exhibitions at The Nikolaj Center of Contemporary Art I 2006, at The Malmö Museum 2008 and at The Danish Architecture Center 2008. He has also shown work at the Barbican Center in London, The Museum of Art in Osaka Japan and at The Philadelphia Museum of Art, Philadelphia, USA.

Herta Müller b.1953 Nitzkydorf, Romania lives and works in Berlin
After being dismissed as a teacher Müller was able to emigrate from Romania in 1987. She is the author of The Land of Green Plums, Nadirs and Everything I Possess I Carry With Me and her work has been translated into over 20 languages. She was won numerous literary prizes including the Kleist prize in 1994, The Aristeion Prize in 1995, and the Franz Werfel Human Rights Award in 2009, in the same year it was announced that she had been awarded The Nobel Prize in Literature.

http://www.kentklich.com

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