Visit Silvia & Bogdan's Atelie profile

Silvia Amancei and Bogdan Armanu (aka: saba, s.a.b.a, or just Silvia & Bogdan), (b. in 1991, Iași / Timișoara, Romania) are an artist couple living and working in Sandnes, Norway. Working together since 2012, their artistic practice transgresses multiple forms and formats, searching for meanings and methods to contextualize their existence within a broad political and cultural spectrum.

Recent solo exhibitions include “ANTIPHON” (2026, Sibiu), “A sound that…” (2024, Sandnes), “The Resilience of Capital” (2022, Craiova) and “Hope dies last…They say…” (2022, Zagreb). Their work has also been shown in group exhibitions in Berlin, Stuttgart, Stockholm, Zurich and Basel, and at the Gangwon Triennale in South Korea.

What inspired you to become an artist?

We believe that the path of becoming an artist is most of the time an accident, or a series of fortunate or misfortunate events, that depends on how much are you at peace of being one. Neither of us was born in a family with artistic backgrounds, on the contrary, we both have a working-class cradle, so our idea of an artist only got defined or even acknowledged much later in life. People supporting our creativity while we were children was the beginning of it, hoping that we could become what they didn’t have the privilege/opportunity to be. So, from a very young age we found ourselves enrolled into art schools, starting with the 5th grade (9 years old). From then on we continued and continued, probably more like a snowball than anything else but we persevered in the face of all odds, forming a set of beliefs out of our encounter with wonderful people. We could say that what made us keep going in our delusion, besides the people around us and their encouragement, is the special quality of art of being nothing and everything in the same time, something that offers you the space to understand life and yourself in it in a much broader and liberating way.

Are there any artists or movements that have influenced or inspired you?

We had the luck to find ourselves enrolled in an art university in a peripheral context, in a marginal big city, in a marginal country, where out of all odds a handful of people have managed to coagulate and connect with the highest level of critical thought. Therefore, it became natural that after our encounter with the local artists and critical thinkers, our young selves to be modeled and to appropriate some of the instruments that these people were working with. Dan Acostioaiei, Catalin Gheorghe, Cristian Nae, Matei Bejenaru, these are people that for the Scandinavian scene may not mean much, but they do have their part in our development at a crucial time, the moment when you choose to remain or depart. Also, through them, we discovered a long row of other writers, starting to empathize and be marked as artists by their writings, finding in their mirroring of the world a comforting thought of familiarity. Therefore, people as Zizek and Berardi, have become through their written word our beloved uncles whose stories have helped us understand the world. Of course, there are many others, each with their thought line, and word, building within what we think today.

What themes or ideas do you explore in your art?

Our practice could be described as heterogenous, spanning across multiple mediums and formats, that from a superficial glance could appear fragmented. We want to believe that all of them are united by our thought process and our continuous negotiation with our identity as humans and artists, rooting this interrogation of the creative process/ need, into social and institutional critiques, always trying to bring into the spotlight the injustices that we find imbedded into life. Looking at life from a materialist lens, where almost everything can be translated into equations of (class)struggle, we try to use art as a tool to mediate, stimulate and irritate, while continually questioning the futility of our actions.

What are you most proud of having achieved as an artist so far?

We are proud to have managed to survive throughout the years and strengthen our symbiosis, following our desires and needs to excrement all the thought that trouble us in the troubled world that we are all living in. We are happy to have each other and we feel safe within our small world of two, without which, we are more than certain that we couldn’t have reached this place in our career and we would have sunk into the multitude of destructions and pressures of life, especially within the elusive mirage of contemporary art.

Is there anything you dream of doing or exploring in the future?

Our first slogan when we started working was “no hope for a future”, and our younger selves were denouncing the mirage of the capitalistic future, that was understood as a continuous lamentation of the present and the following of a never coming fulfillment. After more than 10 years we have come to the conclusion that even though we presented ourselves as depressive artists, we were actually a lot more optimistic than today. Actually, the social landscape that we were criticizing at that time looks a lot better than our present.

Therefore, dreaming and the future seem to have been exhausted unfortunately, and we see this as a generation or even a zeitgeist motive. But to not be total douchebag smartasses, we do hope for the best (for which we are willing to fight for as every right we currently have was fought for in the past by someone) and try our best to adapt to the new cultural landscape we chose to call home, so we look to get settled, get in touch and become an active part of our community, whatever that means and how is that going to unfold, we will see.