ICR Romanian Cultural Institute London

Kombinat - The Industrial Ruins of the Golden Era

The Romanian Cultural Institute presents the exhibition Kombinat: Industrial Ruins of the Golden Era by Serban Bonciocat, including photographs from the outstanding album published by Igloo Media in 2007.

The photographs are of the vast industrial complexes built under Ceausescu throughout Romania: communist mega-structures of a utopian economy - towers, containers, bunkers, pipes, concrete and bricks - that lay down abandoned, while man and nature are strikingly absent.

Untold acres of land are now deserts of crumbling ferro-concrete towers, surrounded by polluted land of evil coloration, with pools of water that are like national repositories of toxic chemicals. (…) It is as if a grey-brown organism that solidified into immovable detritus had invaded the earth and spread malignantly, eating up the landscape for miles around. Only occasionally is a village to be seen in the background, in the midst of which there is a church, anything not of ferro-concrete now appearing like a masterpiece by Brunelleschi by comparison. But the vast industrial complex of ruins dominates all: the horizon, the eye, one's very thoughts. There is no escaping it; as there was never any intention that you should be able to escape it.
Anthony Daniels
Partnership project with

When: 4-21 May 2010, Mon - Fri, 10am - 5pm;
Where: Romanian Cultural Institute London;
Admission: free.