Monday December 01st 2014, 1:21 am
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PAVILION – center for contemporary art & culture – will reformulate the permanent exhibition premises – generating a curatorial office.
PAVILION will also become a curatorial partnership following the original idea of the organization since 1999. As PAVILION’s name alludes to the relative temporary structure of contemporary art, our projects will continue to contain a range of multi-disciplinary and comprehensive content as it carries various formats of articles, essays, interviews, events and artistic projects. In an age of specialization, PAVILION aims to be a new type of institution, one that addresses the inquisitive intellectual.
PAVILION – center for contemporary art & culture – will manifest its production act in the new physical location functioning as base for operations or flexible international conduit and local reception site.
Our office will be located at 29 Băiculești St., Bucharest, with the precious support of UAP (Union of Artists).
PAVILION is the producer BUCHAREST BIENNALE, BUCHAREST FILM BIENNALE, FREE ACADEMY, PAVILION – journal for politics & culture, REFORMA and PAVILION – center for contemporary art & culture.
The PAVILION curatorial office is formed by Răzvan Ion, Eugen Rădescu and Gergő Horváth.
Friday November 14th 2014, 1:19 am
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Jean-Baptiste Del Amo’s first visit to Romania.
13 november 2014
Jean-Baptiste Del Amo (b.1981, Toulouse), considered to be one of the most promising contemporary French writers, Goncourt Prize laureate, was for the first time in Romania, in Bucharest.
On this occasion, the French writer met the Romanian public in an event organized by Pavilion and Vellant publishing house.
The Goncourt Academy awarded him the Prix Goncourt du Premier Roman for “Une éducation libertine” (A Libertine Education), at only age 28, and the French Academy, the Prix François Mauriac. Those prizes were followed by Prix Fénéon of University of Paris and Prix Laurent-Bonelli Virgin-Lire.
Acclaimed by critics and the public, Del Amo also published the novels: “Le Sel”, Gallimard edition, 2010, “Hervé Guibert, photographe”, Gallimard edition, 2010, “Pornographia”, Gallimard edition, 2013.
The talk, took place at PAVILION – center of contemporary art and culture, and pointed out the most common subjects of the well-known writer’s novels, debated the new projects of Del Amo, and connected literary practices with those of contemporary art. The debate focused on the idea of literature as artistic practice and art as a narrative paradigm, and the way in which the two interact and complete each other.
The passion of Del Amo for film and photography was the main subject of the discussion and it will be the header for the book the writer is working on.
After the dialog, the writer accepted to give autographs on the Romanian edition of “A Libertine Education”, translated by Vellant publishing house.
Event organized by Pavilion and Vellant Publishing.
Thursday November 13th 2014, 4:56 am
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The first press conference for the Bucharest Film Biennale by Curator/Director Andrei Rus was held on 12.11.2014, explaining his conceptual approach for the BFB1, together with Răzvan Ion & Eugen Rădescu, Founders.
You can find more information, as well as the concept here.
Friday November 07th 2014, 3:38 am
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On November 6, Mădălina Buhoș held a lecture at PAVILION - center for contemporary art and culture.
Image: Olafur Eliasson, The Weather Project, 2003. Photograph by Tate Photography.
What is the aura of Walter Benjamin and mostly, can we talk about this phenomena in relation to contemporary art?
The lecture focuses in understanding this concept, in the direction that Benjamin gave it, at the moment of its passing into modernity but also in the possibility of its survival through the experience generated by contemporary art. The examples we will discuss are strongly connected to the transformation and consequences that the work of art has suffered after its passing into the era of mechanical reproduction untill contemporaneity and also about the effect that this navigation of shock casted upon the human psyche. The changes come from multiple directions, social, cultural, technological, all of them imposing a shift in the way reality is perceived.
Fredric Jameson said in ‘Postmodernism or Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism’ that the cultural productions of postmodernism distract the spectator, using this term with a reference to Benjamin[1]. The difference between modernism and postmodernism, which Jameson points out, is that the first still keeps residual information of a native nature, of the archaic and that the culture worked from the perspective of this resistance. Postmodernism and also contemporary art is the result of a completed process of modernization. What comes out of this is a world that profoundly belongs to men, in which culture becomes what he defines as a second nature[2], this being also what Benjamin identifies as a necessary condition for the survival of aura.
Contemporary art proposes new methods of being rather than concrete objects, the production of gestures primes the production of things. The artist and the public become a field of collective, participatory and critical experiences of a self-poetic apparatus. It is possible that at the basis of Benjamin’s aura lays utopia, which shape also transforms along with the social and historical going but which originates from the longing that the role of art is one of salvation, through the integration of art into the social arena.
[1] Fredric Jameson, Postmodernism or Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism, Duke University Press, 2001, p IX
[2] Fredric Jameson, Postmodernism or Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism, Duke University Press, 2001, p X
Mădălina Buhoș, born in 12th of November 1989 has a Bachelor’s Degree in Cultural Management at the Bucharest Academy of Economic Studies and a Master’s Degree in Art History: History and Methodology in Visual Studies. Her dissertation thesis was on the subject of Walter Benjamin’s aura in contemporary art. Lives and works in Bucharest.
Friday October 31st 2014, 3:24 am
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Revisiting Romanian Contemporary Art in Search of the Critical Image
On October 30, Ruxandra Demetrescu held a lecture in the frame of the BUCHAREST BIENNALE 7 lecture series at PAVILION - center for contemporary art and culture.
Image: Andrei Tudoran, Car cu boi 1, painting, 2012
I begin with definition of the critical image, as formulated by the French theorist Georges Didi-Huberman: “What is a critical image? An image in crisis, critical of itself, capable of triggering a theoretical reaction”. If we are to accept that “the immediate source of an artwork is the human capacity of thought” (Hannah Arendt) and that there is no such thing as a dialectic image which does not involve the critical intervention of memory, (Walter Benjamin) we can establish a theoretical “guidebook” useful for revisiting contemporary art. Thus, I propose a short journey into the world of Romanian visual art, along an inevitably lacunar and subjective route, in order to identify a path that descends from the artist’s studio, which is built like an ivory tower in the “arena” of public place. I will use the names of artists and artworks as examples, focusing on new mediums of expression, without excluding traditional ones.
Ruxandra Demetrescu (born 1954) is an art historian and art history and theory professor at the Department of Doctoral Studies of the National University of Arts in Bucharest, Romania. She served as the rector of the National University of Arts in Bucharest (2006-2012) and as the first director of the Romanian Culture Institute of Berlin, Germany (1999-2003). She studies the history of art theory in the German-speaking world (Konrad Fiedler, Alois Riegl, Aby Warburg, Walter Benjamin) and that of the Romanian artistic modernism during Interbellum. She has published numerous critical texts in the exhibition catalogues of various Romanian contemporary visual artists.
The 7th BUCHAREST BIENNALE (Bucharest International Biennial for Contemporary Art) is set for May 26th - July 17th, 2016 under curatorship of Niels Van Tomme.
About BB7: www.bucharestbiennale.org
Tuesday October 28th 2014, 3:40 am
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The Curatorial Imaginary: An Overview
On October 27, Niels Van Tomme held a class of Free Academy at PAVILION - center for contemporary art and culture.
Image: Image: Harun Farocki, Niels Van Tomme, and Trevor Paglen. Photo by Elise Gallant, October 24th, 2013.
In his class, Niels Van Tomme addressed some of the specifics of his curatorial practice, situated on the axis between academic and artistic research, institutional and independent practice, and professional and amateur interests. His projects include museum and gallery exhibitions, interventions in public space, and projects curated for the internet.
Niels Van Tomme is the appointed curator of the 7th Bucharest Biennale. He is a curator, researcher, and critic working on the intersections of contemporary culture, politics, and aesthetics. His exhibitions and public programs are shown at venues such as The Kitchen (New York), Värmlands Museum (Karlstad), National Gallery of Art (Washington, DC), Contemporary Arts Center (New Orleans), Gallery 400 (Chicago), and Akademie der Künste (Berlin). A Contributing Editor of Art Papers, he publishes internationally in journals, magazines, and exhibition catalogues. His curatorial endeavors have received grant awards from The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, The Elizabeth Firestone Graham Foundation, Lambent Foundation, and The Nathan Cummings Foundation, as well as critical press in publications such as Afterall, Artforum, Art in America, Afterimage, and The Wall Street Journal.
Free Academy wishes to be an informational platform, a discursive alternative to the official Romanian educational system (unsatisfying), without the intent of placing it in an institutional context. Focusing on a neo-liberal way of teaching, this project would like to attain individual benefits rather than collective ones. Free Academy is a project generated by Pavilion - journal for politics and culture.
Friday October 17th 2014, 2:41 am
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Performative Anthropology. The Case of Pata Rât Ghetto in a Neoliberal Context
On October 16, Adrian Dohotaru held a lecture in the frame of the BUCHAREST BIENNALE 7 lecture series at PAVILION - center for contemporary art and culture.
The lecture focused on a technique called Performative Anthropology, which is in fact a subdivision and a form of expressing engaged anthropology that involves citizen activism, participatory action research (PAR) and street performance. This technique is used by academics, inhabitants of Pata Rat and activists of the Working Group of Civil Society Organizations (gLOC). gLOC is an informal group that tries to raise awareness on the social and economic processes that led to the ghettoization of Pata-Rât inhabitants, from the vicinity of Cluj’s waste dump, and that aims to support the empowering of its inhabitants to request their rights and citizenship. The technique emerged from street protests, following the forced evictions of almost 300 inhabitants of Coastei Street on the 17th of December 2010.
Performative anthropology approaches countercultural methods of the 1960s, Boal’s theatrical notion of spect-actor (Theater of the Oppressed), the situationist concepts of detournement and derive and the avant-garde practice of Arte Povera. This mixture of methods is used in order to create experiences of contradiction (intensified by artistic endeavours) that reveal deeply embedded social inequities of a neoliberal age. As compared to academic linear discourses, it stipulates more concisely and strikingly social and political agendas, and furthers participatory research, artistic and civic projects.
Details about the technique of performative anthropology can be found here:
Adrian-Octavian Dohotaru is an activist and researcher currently working for Ratiu Democracy Center.
The 7th BUCHAREST BIENNALE (Bucharest International Biennial for Contemporary Art) is set for May 26th - July 17th, 2016 under curatorship of Niels Van Tomme.
About BB7: www.bucharestbiennale.org
Friday October 10th 2014, 3:08 am
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WHO IF NOT WE?
Being Here in the Age of Confusion
09.10 - 11.11. 2014
Curated by PAVILION - journal for politics of culture
An exhibition with extracts from the archives of PAVILION, BUCHAREST BIENNALE, FREE ACADEMY, REFORMA, BUCHAREST FILM BIENNALE, PAVILION RESOURCE ROOM
PAVILION – the project started in 1999 which generates the entire activity of the organization (BUCHAREST BIENNALE, FREE ACADEMY, REFORMA, BUCHAREST FILM BIENNALE, PAVILION – center for contemporary art & culture, PAVILION RESOURCE ROOM), alludes to the relative temporary structure of contemporary art.
“WHO IF NOT WE? / DACĂ NU NOI, CINE?” talks about 15 years of resistance in the local/Romanian art scene, about the subterfuges within the struggle against chaotic bureaucracy. It talks about the production of possibilities in the Romanian contemporary art scene, about the placement in the local socio-political field and about generating new perspectives and directions for immediate action. It is and exhibition which marks 15 years of existence and resistance through critique and creating linkages to access culture.
Critical thinking refers to the apprehension and perception of things critically, or argumentatively if seen from a first person perspective (in your position). Your position – your positioning – means to analyse the social, political and economical space where you evolve. For a “post-“ (communist, conceptual, modern) country, it is important to apprehend its history, to criticise it – either positively or negatively. The history of this type of habitat lies at the basis of the definition and terminological delimitation of the space and has also structured its mission: critical approach to immediacy.
Through the word “pavilion” we understand a construction that is temporary and built for a specific purpose – something between a house and a tent. Its primary function is functionality – it can be easily installed and uninstalled, you can change its location rapidly and still, it has the potential to mark a certain space, be it outside or inside of the pavilion. A temporary structure, just as PAVILION journal is a temporary platform for politics, art and contemporary culture.
The concept of temporality of the pavilion fits perfectly with the way the culture of today is (re-) presented. Art and culture are dynamic, temporary, often changing and moving not only backwards, forwards, left and right, but in every other direction. You need a temporary structure to analyze contemporary culture – you have to be fast and dynamic and you need a medium that is as temporary as the field it represents, but that should still remain solid. This is why a structure such as the pavilion could be useful.
“Being here” places us in a very specific social setting. A setting of mobility, territoriality and a place between different borders where the metaphors of globalization linked to the disappearance of said borders, implies that people, capital and goods take advantage of the freedom of movement, leading to the creation of a new network of mobility, which drives us towards cultural progress, the cultural act becomes an object of recreation, entertainment or personal development through leisure and this is an ubiquitous reality in contemporary society. It is claimed quite often that such a conception of culture would be expressed freely, as an abstract element, through unity-in-diversity, through universality-by-difference and this could not be truer.
To move fast in different directions is the most important criteria for an institution today –to quote Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari and their book “Milles Plateaux”, the institution should be a temporary structure, like a rhizome. A rhizome is sort of a stem cell that puts out lateral shoots in any directions, without having a dichotomous structure, but instead a pluralistic structure. A rhizome is a temporary structure insofar that it can spread out from every point within the rhizome to every other point in, or outside of the rhizome, having the possibility to grow new shoots and also to mortify old shoots – a structure, which is necessary for a cultural institution today – temporary and moving in every possible direction.
Only this temporary structure, the rhizoid structure, allows us to intervene in the “society of the spectacle” to exactly analyze recent issues and their power structures and to finally turn the spectacle upside down. We have the possibility to re-think processes and to redirect them.
Apart from the critical expectations of the PAVILION, we are also trying to undertake another type of critical thinking: the criticism of the person (id est “persona”), of the individual, the criticism of everyone by and from everyone, including self-criticism. We propose this commitment in order to have the opportunity to involve ourselves – even superficially or vulgarly – in the existence of our society.
Nevertheless, the basic function of all of these instruments, the journal, the centre and the biennale, will remain concretization.
P.S. The ideea of the title and the concept of the exhibition was inspired by the following texts: Zsolt Petrányi, “Chaos: The age of confusion”, reader of Bucharest Biennale 2, in Pavilion #9; Jan-Erik Lundström, “Being here. Mapping the contemporary”, reader of Bucharest Biennale 3, vol. 1: text book in Pavilion #12; Anne Barlow, “Tactics for the here and now”, reader of Bucharest Biennale 5, in Pavilion #16; Felix Vogel, “Handlung. On Producing Possibilities”, reader of Bucharest Biennale 4, in Pavilion #15.
Wednesday July 30th 2014, 2:26 am
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Gergő Horváth becomes the Artistic Director of Pavilion Bucharest
After an extensive search involving a number of highly qualified Romanian and international candidates, the Board of Pavilion is delighted to announce the appointment of Gergő Horváth as Pavilion’s new Artistic Director, effective September 1, 2014.
He will also design the program of the art center and will work on the general program of the organization.
Gergő Horváth will develop Pavilion´s role locally and internationally, and will develop a program that will encompass a series of strands rooted in long-term critical inquiries, cross-modeling practices that have emerged from recent shifts in, and diversification of, concepts and forms in art and contemporary culture. Gergő Horváth’s activities will take multiple formats and will be devised in collaboration with a network of Romanian and international organizations.
Pavilion, is considered one of the most dynamic and vital contemporary art organizations in Europe, which generated Bucharest Biennale, Pavilion - journal for politics and culture, Pavilion - center for contemporary art and culture, and Reforma - a communitarian platform.
“This is a new development in the process of restructuring the entire organization, creating new opportunities and I am sure Mr. Horváth will bring a breath of fresh air in such an important period for the organization.” said Răzvan Ion, the co-founder of the organization.
Gergő Horváth, the appointed Artistic Director of Pavilion, said regarding the program for the 2014 - 2015 season that he will mark the 15 year activity of Pavilion with an exhibition, which “will be a moment of reflection upon 15 year of strenuous, but highly constructive activity. By delving into the archives of the organization which was the catalyst of the several instruments of critical thinking that have been developed and by seeing what the contemporary art scene was 15 years ago in Romania and what it is today, we will be able to pinpoint crucial issues of the art world that have remained, or have never been properly dealt with. Also, this will be the starting point for a series of solo exhibitions by artists who are not interested in the recent histories of the 20th century (which is a very persistent objective of the local art world), but rather focus on the critical topics of the now and favor the construction of new societal values and structures, instead of the export of the obsolete non-values.”
Gergő Horváth will succeed Răzvan Ion, who was the Artistic Director of Pavilion between 2008 - 2014.
Răzvan Ion and Eugen Rădescu will remain the founders and the directors of the organization.
Gergő Horváth (b. 1993) is an artist, curator and cultural manager. He studied music and visual arts with a special interest in makeshift politics and DIY social structures. Recently he was the curator of BUCHAREST BIENNALE 6, was exhibited in the “Affluence of the working class from differentiation to collectivism” and curated “100 Hungarian Minutes”. He was invited lecturer at University of Bucharest and University of Fine Arts Budapest. His work was featured in publications like NZZ, EyeContact NZ, re:sculpt, Lettre Internationale, TheChronicle, Reforma, Zeppelin, The Institute, Frieze etc.
BUCHAREST BIENNALE APPOINTS NIELS VAN TOMME AS CURATOR FOR 2016 EDITION
July 28, 2014 - the 7th BUCHAREST BIENNALE (Bucharest International Biennial for Contemporary Art), generated by Pavilion - journal for politics & culture - is set for May 26th - July 17th, 2016, under the curatorship of Niels Van Tomme (BE).
The Bucharest Biennale International Advisory Board met in Berlin on July 14, 2014 and awarded the curatorship for the 7th Bucharest Biennale unanimously to Niels Van Tomme (BE).
The Bucharest Biennale is interested in exploring links between creative practice and social progress, as well as correspondences between local and global contexts. Now in its tenth year, the Biennale continues to build a strong partnership between Bucharest—a geocultural space where the political is reflected in all aspects of life—and the rest of the World. In transcending specific geographical, historical, or political frameworks, it connects to a broader complexity, namely the one of “resistance” within the quotidian realm.
As a biannual cultural event, BB’s temporary structure allows a deconstruction of the systems supporting and underlying what has been called the “experience economy”. The Bucharest Biennale goes beyond merely orchestrating memorable “events” that aim for prescribed notions of customizable transformation, which are characteristic of this economic model and importantly reflected in the global biennial format as well. Instead, the Biennale offers a platform to analyse, and potentially redirect, current social, political and economic imaginaries. It intends to make visible the power structures supporting such spheres of control, addressing the ways in which they are organized and coordinated, as well as implemented across broad segments of society. The Biennale is an attempt to turn these scripted “experiences” upside down, to re-think and re-imagine processes of domination, while positioning the city of Bucharest as a field of cultural action and exchange.
With its innovative model refined throughout the previous six editions, the Bucharest Biennale is now regarded as one of the most vital biennials in Europe, holding a widely respected position within the international art scene.
For BB7, curator Niels Van Tomme is interested in exploring the unique position Romania—and more specifically: Bucharest—holds within a vastly expanding global network of standardized, economic exchanges. In exploring these structures, he aims to complicate notions of marginality and isolatedness historically assigned to Romania and the broader Eastern European region. Van Tomme states: “As our collective desire for change seems to be replaced by capitalist illusions such as individual choice and the relentless arrival of the new, what can we learn from considering such developments from the distinguishing perspective of Bucharest? Does it merely represent one of many connecting points in the ever-expanding economic infrastructures it inevitably cannot escape? Or, to the contrary, does it truly signify a site of ‘resistance’ and ‘action’, as the Biennale sets forth to explore?”
Niels Van Tomme (BE, 1977) is a New York-based curator, researcher, and critic working on the intersections of contemporary culture, politics, and aesthetics. He holds an M.A. in Cultural Studies from the University of Leuven, Belgium. Currently associated with the Center for Art, Design and Visual Culture at UMBC in Baltimore, he merges academic research with accessible, and often confrontational exhibition making. His exhibitions and public programs are shown at venues such as The Kitchen (New York), Värmlands Museum (Karlstad), National Gallery of Art (Washington, DC), Contemporary Arts Center (New Orleans), Gallery 400 (Chicago), and Akademie der Künste (Berlin). His most recent exhibition project Visibility Machines: Harun Farocki and Trevor Paglen opened at the Center for Art, Design and Visual Culture in late 2013 and is currently touring internationally, while an edited volume is available through D.A.P., Distributed Art Publishers. His curatorial endeavours have received grant awards from The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, The Elizabeth Firestone Graham Foundation, Lambent Foundation, and The Nathan Cummings Foundation, as well as critical press in publications such as Afterall, Artforum, Art in America, Afterimage, and The Wall Street Journal. Van Tomme is a Contributing Editor at Art Papers magazine, while his writings in a wide variety of publications explore contemporary art, literature, and music in relationship to broader societal and cultural developments. His latest book, Aesthetic Justice, Intersecting Artistic and Moral Perspectives, co-edited with Pascal Gielen, is forthcoming as part of the Antennae Series, Arts in Society by Valiz, Amsterdam.
Brief Final Report
BUCHAREST BIENNALE 6
Apprehension. Understanding Through Fear of Understanding
May 23rd – July 24nd 2014
Thursday, July 24h 2014, BUCHAREST BIENNALE 6 - Bucharest International Biennial for Contemporary Art - curated by Gergő Horváth, entitled “Apprehension. Understanding Through Fear of Understanding”, has closed after more than 8 weeks, during which it has enjoyed an unprecedented success for a Romanian contemporary art event.
BUCHAREST BIENNALE has gained throughout the years an international reputation and its last edition has expressed the potential for development of this type of artistic event.
BB6 has been composed of the main exhibition curated by Gergő Horváth (b. 1993) with 19 participating artists from 12 countries, 22 artworks, 9 works being produced especially for the biennial. BB6 had more then 20 parallel and 5 connected events. In the frame of the BB6, the curator generated every week “Expose Practice” a weekly series of talks where the participating artists in Bucharest Biennale 6 where invited to discuss their practice, research methodologies and thinking in an informal setting.
PAVILION - journal for politics and culture - published a special issue, having a total of 208 pages and containing texts written by renowned theoreticians such as Chantal Mouffe, Gergő Horváth, Florian Gottke, David Goldenberg, Răzvan Ion, George Prochnik, Cătălin Avramescu, Jörg Heiser, Alexandru Senciuc.
BB6 took place in 5 locations and publicly intervened in the city.
The research and selection process, as well as preparing theoretical texts took almost 2 years.
The average age of the BB6 team is 22,5 years, the team comprising 4 employees and 17 volunteers and interns.
The biennial attracted media attention as well as the previous edition. Thus, at the opening day over 500 professionals and press participated, both national and international. The biennial was featured by over 100 publications, news agencies, radio/TV stations and blogs, such as ProTv, Frieze, FlashArt, International Herald Tribune, Euronews, The Art Newspaper, The Guardian, Die Tageszeitung, The Harper’s Bazaar, Reforma, The Economist, Elle, Cabinet, TVR 1, Digi 24, Adevărul, Gandul, Vice, Zeppelin, Biz, Sculpture, ArtDaily, Cariere, EyeContact and many others.
BB6 had approximately 27.000 visitors and it was the first editions with ticket entrance. More then 5.000 people visited BB6 during the opening days and the white night of the galleries.
BB6 was the first cultural organization in Romania who benefit of the Google Ad Grants and the BB6 website eached more then 2.3 million impressions. The FB pages posts had more then 800.000 people reached, including the promotional posts.
2 million napkins with BB6 logo was printed and served with Illy Expresso coffee all around the country.
The biennial website, associate websites and the newsletter have had more than 390.000 viewers from 81 countries, before and during the event.
The BB6 budget was the lowest budget in the history of BB, which make BB6 probably the most under financed biennial in the world.
BB6 had as strategic partner UniCredit Tiriac Bank. The main institutional partner was Romanian Cultural Institute. BB6 was also supported by National University of Arts Bucharest, UAP Romania, Institute for Political Research and Peasant Museum Bucharest.
Among the international institutions that have contributed to the financing of BB6 were the BAM Belgium, OCA Norway, Austrian Cultural Forum etc.
Respecting tradition, the Romanian Ministry of Culture and the City Council of Bucharest refused to support BB6.
The curator for BUCHAREST BIENNALE 7, which takes place May 26th - July 17th, 2016, was already appointed by the Bucharest Biennale International Advisory Board after the last meeting in Berlin and will be announced soon.
For images on the installation view of BB6 you can access our FB account or you can download hi-res images at www.bucharestbiennale.org/BB6_images.zip
On the 10th of July, Arantxa Etcheverria held an artist talk under the title “Expose Practice”, a parallel event of Bucharest Biennale 6.
Expose Practice is a weekly series of talks in Pavilion – center for contemporary art & culture by the artists which are participants in Bucharest Biennale 6 and present in Bucharest. The talks invite the speakers to discuss their practice, research methodologies and thinking in an informal setting.
The series is generated by the curator of Bucharest Biennale 6, Gergő Horváth.
Arantxa Etcheverria (b. 1975 in France) lives in Romania since 2006. She studied art at Villa Arson, Nice and scenography at The National Theatre in Strasbourg. Solo exhibitions: 2009: “01″ H’art Gallery, Bucharest, organiser Dan Popescu; 2013: “Studio/Structure”, Anexa of Museum of Contemporary Art, Bucharest, curator Ruxandra Balaci; 2014 : “Corner”, Calina Gallery, Timisoara, curator Liviana Dan. Group exhibitions: 2009: Cultural event organized in cooperation with the French Embassy at Romanian National Art Museum, Bucharest; 2010 : “Pasarela”, Fashion festival, French Institute, Bucharest; 2010: “White Night of Galleries”, The Ark, Bucharest; 2011: “Avant Premiere”, Fashion and Art Festival, The Ark, Bucharest; 2012: “Volta Show”, Basel Art Fair, Switzerland; 2013: “White Night of Galleries”, Anexa of Museum of Contemporary Art, Bucharest.
On the 3rd of July, Zoltán Béla held an artist talk under the title “Expose Practice”, a parallel event of Bucharest Biennale 6.
Expose Practice is a weekly series of talks in Pavilion – center for contemporary art & culture by the artists which are participants in Bucharest Biennale 6 and present in Bucharest. The talks invite the speakers to discuss their practice, research methodologies and thinking in an informal setting.
The series is generated by the curator of Bucharest Biennale 6, Gergő Horváth.
Zoltán Béla (b. 1977 in Târgu-Mureş) graduated from the University of Arts and Design, Cluj-Napoca, Department of Painting (class of 2001). He uses a rather wide range of media, such as painting, installations or objects. His painting is realistic, loaded with historical references and metaphysical significances inspired from his personal biography, but also from the East-European recent history track, which address to the viewer’s feelings and tend to identify the important moments of an entire generation formed in the communist period. What links all these aspects is a feeling of aesthetic romanticism. He draws inspiration from my very personal archive of memories, experiences and feelings. “My paintings bear the mark of antithesis, sometimes as a therapy to purge inner fears, sometimes as a mirror of reality. Composition, light and contrasts are very important for me, as a heritage from the Baia Mare and Cluj Schools of Art. I add my warm personal touch to the collective memory of an Eastern European childhood, youth, and maturity. Subjects keep varying, therapy through art continues”. He currently lives and works in Bucharest.
Solo Exhibitions (selection): 2015 – Campoi Gallery, Munchen, De 2014- Anca Poterasu Gallery, Bucharest, RO 2014 – Marina Gisich Gallery, Sant Petersburg, RU 2012- Traces, Anca Poterasu Gallery, Bucharest, Ro 2011 - In meditation: Feeling the Silence, Anca Poteraşu Gallery, Bucharest, RO 2010 - A certain time, a certain place, a certain state, Little Yellow Studio, Bucharest, RO 2009 - Self Reflecting 30, Point Contemporary Gallery, Bucharest, RO 2009 - Transition Icons (curated by Valerio Dehò and Cosmin Năsui), Carini & Donatini Gallery, IT 2007 - Car Wreck, Sadaba, ES.
Group Exhibitions (selection): 2012- Curator’s Network- Brukenthal Museum, Sibiu, Ro 2011 - The New Figurative - Victoria Art Centre, Bucharest, RO 2011 - Coloring the Grey - The 4th Moscow Biennale of Contemporary Art, RU 2011 - I Am a Romanian: The Bucharest – Tel Aviv Route, IL 2010 - Out Of Sacred (with Andres Serrano, Shirin Neshat, Kehinde Wiley, Bruno Zanichelli, Ciprian Mureşan) - Arezzo, IT 2010 - Police the Police, The 4th Bucharest Biennial of Young Artists, Bucharest, RO 2010 - The Berlin Wall - Promenade Gallery, Vlore, Albania, AL.
Thursday June 26th 2014, 10:05 am
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On the 26th of June, Adrian Dan held an artist talk under the title “Expose Practice”, a parallel event of Bucharest Biennale 6.
Expose Practice is a weekly series of talks in Pavilion – center for contemporary art & culture by the artists which are participants in Bucharest Biennale 6 and present in Bucharest. The talks invite the speakers to discuss their practice, research methodologies and thinking in an informal setting.
The series is generated by the curator of Bucharest Biennale 6, Gergő Horváth.
Adrian Dan completed a M.A. with honors at the École nationale supérieure des beaux-arts in Paris, France. Previously he studied at the University of applied arts in Vienna, Austria and the National university of the arts, Bucharest, Romania. Recent exhibitions include Centro de Arte Dos de Mayo, (Madrid, Spain), Rosascape (Paris), Palais des Beaux-Arts (Paris).
On the 19th of June, Gabriel Stoian held an artist talk under the title “Expose Practice”, a parallel event of Bucharest Biennale 6.
Expose Practice is a weekly series of talks in Pavilion – center for contemporary art & culture by the artists which are participants in Bucharest Biennale 6 and present in Bucharest. The talks invite the speakers to discuss their practice, research methodologies and thinking in an informal setting.
The series is generated by the curator of Bucharest Biennale 6, Gergő Horváth.
Gabriel Stoian is an emerging conceptual artist/activist - not in the sense of being under the illusion that his art will change the world directly or immediately; but more because his work is built as a subversive, ironical and critical reaction towards the instruments of power and its symbols. His practice is based on different mediums such as: public interventions, installation, assemblage, object, conceptual writing and a few others that he does not know how to define exactly. He graduated a M.A. in the graphics department at the “University of Art and Design” from Cluj-Napoca in 2010 and thereafter he was selected as a resident artist with the “Hàbitat Artístic Castelló” – Cultural Center of Castellón de la Plana, Spain – where he developed and exhibited a personal project during 2011. He is currently undergoing his PHD with the same University of Arts in Cluj.
”Although I studied for a long time in Cluj, I believe that I don’t have a lot in common with the so-called “School of Cluj”. I’m more of an autodidact and not so fond of being affiliated to different institutions or places. I have always enjoyed a nomadic existence, working from location to location. My ideas require new backdrops and starting points and this cannot be found in the same place all the time”.
Currently, he lives and works in Bucharest and finds it very enjoyable.
On the 12th of June, Matei Arnăutu held an artist talk under the title “Expose Practice”, a parallel event of Bucharest Biennale 6.
Expose Practice is a weekly series of talks in Pavilion – center for contemporary art & culture by the artists which are participants in Bucharest Biennale 6 and present in Bucharest. The talks invite the speakers to discuss their practice, research methodologies and thinking in an informal setting.
The series is generated by the curator of Bucharest Biennale 6, Gergő Horváth.
Matei Arnăutu (b. 1978, Bucharest) has graduated from the National University of Arts in Bucharest, Faculty of Fine Arts, major in Painting, class of prof. Florin Mitroi. In 2007 he presented his dissertation at the Faculty of Fine Arts, West University in Timișoara. At present he is a PhD. student at the National University of Arts in Bucharest, coordinator prof. dr. Cristian-Robert Velescu. In 2001 he participated in the international exhibition “Balkan Youth Festival” in Litohoro, Greece and in 2002 he received second place in painting for the exhibition “Accents and Fingerprints”, Apollo Gallery, Bucharest. In 2008 he exhibited at Mora Gallery under the title “Join” a series of common objects which are recontextualized in the space of the gallery. In 2011 he took part in the second edition of the exhibition Experimental Engraving organized at “Ion Manu” Cultural Center in Otopeni, which had as an attraction point the notion of Flash Code. In 2011 he participated with a series of lamps cnoverted from calculator plates, old postal boxes or willow baskets in the group exhibition “Lost&Found”. He started to exhibit at and be represented by Anaid Art Gallery since 2012 with a great exhibition entitled “Rembo’s Dream”, part of the 6th Edition of the Galleries’ White Night in Bucharest.
Wednesday June 11th 2014, 4:57 am
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On the 5th of June, Marilena Preda-Sânc held an artist talk under the title “Expose Practice”, a parallel event of Bucharest Biennale 6.
Expose Practice is a weekly series of talks in Pavilion – center for contemporary art & culture by the artists which are participants in Bucharest Biennale 6 and present in Bucharest. The talks invite the speakers to discuss their practice, research methodologies and thinking in an informal setting.
The series is generated by the curator of Bucharest Biennale 6, Gergő Horváth.
Marilena Preda-Sânc graduated from the Institute of Fine Arts “Nicolae Grigorescu” in 1979. She has a PHD. in Visual Arts and, from 2008, she is a professor at the National University of Arts, Bucharest and President of Bucharest Painting Department of Romanian Fine Artists’ Union. Other positions held are: Editor in Chief – Contrapunct Magazine; Member of AICA (International Association of Art Critics); Founding Member of ARFA (Romanian Association of Women in the Arts); Coordinator of BA and MA projects of Public Art.
Wednesday June 11th 2014, 4:25 am
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On the 29th of May, Mihai Zgondoiu held an artist talk under the title “Expose Practice”, a parallel event of Bucharest Biennale 6.
Expose Practice is a weekly series of talks in Pavilion – center for contemporary art & culture by the artists which are participants in Bucharest Biennale 6 and present in Bucharest. The talks invite the speakers to discuss their practice, research methodologies and thinking in an informal setting.
The series is generated by the curator of Bucharest Biennale 6, Gergő Horváth.
Mihai Zgondoiu is a Romanian visual artist born in 1982 in Medias, Sibiu. Exploring many areas of the visual arts such as drawing, collage, photography, video-installation, performance and urban art, he participated in numerous group and solo exhibitions in Romania and abroad. His most recent exhibitions and personal projects are: The Artist’s Golden Hand / FivePlus Gallery in Wien & Aiurart Gallery in Bucharest; BreakBody / Museum of Arts in Timișoara; Lenin’s Sleep / Free Press Square in Bucharest; The Red Line / The National Center of Dance in Bucharest; The Red Carpet / The Yard of the Schlooss Museum in Linz, Austria; Freedom as Visual Pattern / Hampden Gallery – Incubator Art Space, Amherst, Massachusetts USA; Me Matrix / Calina Gallery in Timișoara; Me / Contemporary Art Gallery of the Brukenthal National Museum in Sibiu. Since 2009 he has created a contemporary art space in Bucharest – ATELIER 030202 – and coordinated various visual projects as a curator, and since December 2012 has been the co-curator of the geamMAT Gallery of the Art Museum in Timișoara. Member of UAP, he graduated from the University of Art and Design in Timisoara, has a master degree in graphics design, and is enrolled in the doctoral program of the National University of Arts Bucharest.
Saturday April 05th 2014, 5:22 am
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On the 20th of March, 2014, Silvia Vasilescu held a lecture at PAVILION center under the title ‘Reconfigure at will. Short lecture on the productive aspects of disobedience in artistic practices’.
From feminism to institutional critique to the apartment gallery movement and relational aesthetics/social practice/community art there is, in some measure, an act of disobedience. The act of disobedience is important in every society or community, even in the art world, not just to fight the wrongdoings of a corrupt governmental power, but also to test the system in place and give to those who are a minority the same power as the majority.
In the context of artistic practices, it is an action of defying or denying the rules set by institutions (in a small percent by the museum, the gallery, even the art market and, in an overwhelming percent, by the art school). As in the case of feminist art, the apartment gallery movement or community practices, these actions of disobedience proved to be productive, by creating an alternative to institutions, mediums and functions already known. In the case of feminist art, one positive effect is the emergence of other mediums, mediums considered peripheral until then, such as ceramics, fibers and performance. The apartment gallery movement in cities like Manchester (mid ’90s), or Chicago (’80s/’00s), tried to create an alternative to the small and elitist art scene, continuing the creative process and defying the idea of prestige as being tied to a space. A third example is community art, or social practice/relational aesthetics, that created a new function for the space and the practice itself.
On the other hand, there are acts of disobedience that prove to be disruptive in the sense of lacking any creative outcome. At the same time not having these acts of disobedience proves to be much worse, as for an ever changing system, such as the art world, stagnation is by far the worst scenario.
Silvia Vasilescu (b.1986) works as an artist and arts administrator. Received her MFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago/SAIC, in 2012, and her BFA from The National University of Arts – Bucharest, in 2008. Adopting a collaborative practice, she has worked with different curators, artists and writers, among those projects are Public Opinion (with Christina Long), and [perplex] (with Simina Neagu). Since 2009 she has worked as an arts administrator and was part of various curatorial and educational projects in institutions such as Enclave in London; School of the Art Institute of Chicago and Hyde Park Art Center in Chicago; Pavilion in Bucharest.
Sunday January 19th 2014, 7:34 am
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On the 16th of January PAVILION hosted 100 HUNGARIAN MINUTES a screening project curated byGergő Horváth and initiated by Razvan Ion and Eugen Radescu, followed by a Q&A session with the curator.
“Hungary has known a very rapid economic growth after the fall of communism, subsequently becoming at the end of the ’90s the model-state for many of the countries in Central and South-eastern Europe, having an open-minded and democratic ideology. Living its communist history as an accumulative experience, rather than a nostalgic one, it was maybe one of the first and only countries in the ex-soviet bloc where a rupture between recent history and the contemporary world was apparent.
How can a country which has such a blood-filled and extremist history become the image of liberalism in Europe, after which becoming an example of discretionary politics asserted by radical governments? Maybe this liberalist image only exists on the surface. If the past government sent combat vehicles against revolts from Budapest caused by the same government, the actual leadership modified the Constitution without a referendum and says that a state without military force cannot be a powerful entity. The lack of coherence in the discourse of the leadership, be it political or spiritual, is producing a societal imbalance and a notable fracture between the progressive and the traditionalist parties. Nationalism and conservatism vs. progressivism and contemporary thought.”
Gergő Horváth (b. 1993) is an artist, curator and cultural manager. He studied music and is presently a student, interested in theory and contemporary art. He considers himself self-taught, even though he attends a university. He lives in Cluj and Bucharest.
Artists: Miklós Erhardt, Zsolt Keserue, Gyula Július, Erika Baglyas, Gyula Pauer, János Sugár, Éva Emese Kiss
Monday December 16th 2013, 3:32 am
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On the 12 of December David Goldenberg held a lecture at PAVILION center under the title ‘Between Revolution an Heresy’.
In the 90’s, the Hamburg-based theorist Michael Lingner introduced through two texts, indebted to Luhmann’s Systems theory, the concept of Post Autonomy; a term which is appropriated from the 70’s in response to Barthes’ “Death of the Author”. These texts crudely worked through the inherent logic in art that led to the impasse known as Post Modern Art, the consequences of a non-developing art that continues along the route of Post Modernism and outlines a path that separates from that impasse.Although Lingner did not develop the route out of this quandary, which proposed a fundamental rethinking of art and artistic concepts, this mapped out the inherent potentiality of Post Autonomy. During the 90’s, further authors developed similar sounding descriptions, which also proposed radical breaks with a normalised art world in the form of an artistic strike. This was a refusal to contribute creative labour to the art industry in the manner of Gustav Metzger’s art strike, without following down that path. We can now see that the thinking revolving around Post Autonomy during this elementary stage either sought to interrogate the symptoms of Post Modernism or find solutions that are too radical to be carried out. During the beginning of the new century the ideas have undergone further developments.
In 2008 Peter Osbourne, Charles Esche and Jeff Wall redefined Post Autonomy as a practice that is a set of theories interrogating Post Conceptual Art. Contextualised within the Biennial form, Post Autonomy also interrogates the Biennial form, Colonisation and Globalisation, meaning the spatial reach of a Euro-Centric tradition. More recently, theorists such as Pamela Lee (“Leaving the Art World”) address Post Autonomy in more general terms that revolve around rethinking through what is understood by Autonomy and its various permutations, or advocating the very radical actions that the earlier theorists proposed. However, what appears in retrospect is that Post Autonomy as a body of descriptions makes more sense, and that it would be more exact to see these descriptions as the difficulties and complexity faced when we use terms or concepts that are unable to adequately describe the existing state of affairs.
In that respect, Post Autonomy can be seen as the earliest register of the symptoms not of Post Modernism but of Neo-Liberalism, the task of understanding art and thinking that we witness being emptied out.
David Goldenberg is a London based artist. In 2014 he will publish a book of recent texts and projects examining “Post Autonomy”. He was exhibited in The Caspian Biennial Convention; collateral exhibition at Venice Biennial, 2013; 1st Land Art Biennial of Mongolia; 10th Istanbul Biennial; ICA Philadelphia; Shedhalle, Zurich; 6th Sharjah Biennial; Tate Modern; ICA London, UK and many more. Between 2010 – 2011 he produced 10 programmes for Resonance FM radio examining Post Autonomy. He lives and works in London.
Sunday November 17th 2013, 4:12 am
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On the 14th of November Alexandra Enache held a lecture at PAVILION center concerning gender positions and body politics in the discourse of the superhero comics.
When we talk about the comic-book culture we need to take into consideration the fact that this product doesn’t exist in a vacuum. Comics are part of the media, promoting a similar type of message which uses and shapes concepts such as identity, race, gender, individualism and other problems of the current culture. According to the social cognitive theory, media messages serve as a meaningful source for the acquisition of “gender-linked knowledge and competencies” and the development of expectations of gender roles and conduct, self-evaluative standards, and self-efficacy beliefs. Thus, it is expected that the representation of the male and female characters in the media to influence attitudes and beliefs in viewers’ perceptions regarding gender identity.
The superhero is a symbol of power and a cultural product. The symbolic dimension is shaped through the hyperphysical body. It is a physic Gestalt, a product of a series of beliefs and values that can be read in terms of a gender analysis. There are few symbols that can communicate in such an efficient manner as the pop cultural invention of the superhero, becoming as such one of the most capable visual vehicles of communication. The superhero body – design, costume, posture – is not only a symbol of the comic book as a commodity, but, as any other type of media message, it generates a set of implications in the way in which identities, attitudes and beliefs regarding gender are constructed. In this context we can talk about the notion of ‘hyper-gendering’ – a familiar narrative element in comics. The superhero body is submitted to this type of treatment that places it in a conventional category of gender norms. The male body internalizes cultural standards of masculinity, adapting cultural behaviours and attitudes of hyper-masculinity (independence, strength, invulnerability, sexual virility). Wolverine, Thor, Batman, Iron Man, Green Lantern are a few examples of these stereotypes of large, well-defined muscular bodies. Subsequently, Wonder Woman, Super Girl, Miss Marvel, Cat Woman, Black Widow and other female characters from the comics universe share an aesthetic typical of western beauty, with an impossibly slender yet voluptuous physique. Their superhero costume is generally tight, sleek and, most of the times, revealing. Their hyper-feminization in a world of male superheroes epitomises the idealisation of masculinity.
The comic book industry and the superhero culture were traditionally a white, straight boys’ club. Only recently have they started to open up to a larger audience, to include and approach other categories of readers. After almost a century of comics culture we are assisting to a slow process of progressive body politics in comic books. In this line, the future lecture is meant as a debate over the situation of the superhero body in the terms of idealisation, objectification and sexualisation: why the design of the superhero matters outside the fictional universe of graphics and what type of gender messages does it generate?
Alexandra Enache is a cultural manager. She received a Bachelor’s degree in cultural studies from The University of Bucharest with the paper “Social mentalities and realities at Fin de Siècle. Reflections over the gender identity crisis” and she holds an MA in History of Art and Philosophy of Culture. Presently she is assistant coordinator at PAVILION – center for contemporary art & culture and coordinator of Bucharest Biennale. She worked as editor of the series of conferences organised by the Bucharest National Theatre and collaborated in the domain of public relations with Cotroceni Museum. She is interested in gender studies and social movements and she is currently working on her first curatorial project, “100 Greek Minutes”. She lives and works in Bucharest.
Monday November 04th 2013, 3:11 am
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On October 31 2013 Anca Nuță held a lecture at PAVILION center which generated a debate on the private sponsor’s reasons of involvement in the cultural sector and offered those who are interested examples of adequate methodologies for obtaining private funding.
Why do we fight for art? Winston Churchill, the Prime Minister of Great Britain, being confronted with the proposal of suspending the financing of cultural projects during the Second World War, replied eloquently: “If we don’t fight for art, then what do we fight for?”
Artists, curators, art critics and, generally, everyone who is involved in the creative process set out on the assumption of a total independence from the economic realities of the moment, a necessary stance to support an independent and authentic speech. On average, this premise is contradicted by the reality of implementing a project in public space. The needed financial support is, at large, provided by private companies and government institutions, this type of mechanism being functional especially in countries with an adequate cultural agenda. Taking into consideration Romania’s specific context, how should the initiators of cultural projects address the problem of financing so as not to imperil the project’s independence and, at the same time, to respect the values promoted by the sponsor? What do companies actually expect from those who seek their support and why are they motivated to get involved? Do they have economic reasons or is it about the image/brand joint venture? “Company vs. Artist” or “Company and The Artist”? (Anca Nuță)
Anca Nuță is a communication specialist and, in the last 10 years, has been actively involved in financing projects in the cultural sector in Romania. For over 12 years she has been in charge of corporate communication for UniCredit Țiriac Bank and, since 2013, she has taken over the marketing retail communication as Identity and Communication Director.
Saturday October 26th 2013, 4:27 am
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On October 24, 2013, PAVILION center for contemporary art and culture hosted a dialogue between Eugen Rădescu and Andreea Pătru, under the title “Corpo santo”.
This event, in the frame of the exhibition “Affluence of the working class from differentiation to collectivism”, was a debate on the connection that can be established between fashion and the usage of religious symbols. Fashion is a cultural practice with its own rules and structures, and its theoretical schemes which are based on the ideas of domination and oppression suppose, mostly, a means in which the dominant shuts out the oppressed, by bringing them closely to invisibility – fashion makes no exception, here also the obvious way by which the repressed fight back this condemnation to invisibility seems to be the perseverance in making oneself seen/ remarked/ breaking the limits of the mainstream pattern.
The statement to which the western cultural practices in fashion and style relate is the cornerstone of the Christianity: God made the human being after His Own image. The human is a product of His creator tainted by the imperfection brought on by the original sin. Clothes hide, yet express – a style is a developing process. The true mission of fashion is the one of a means of expressing, of communicating yourself to the world. Should the influence of Christianity in fashion be a statement of the religious beliefs by which we are driven or the emancipation of faithful? Sometimes, the influence of religion can be seen in the chastity of the clothing items, the average wearing of a small necklace with a cross, the simplicity of the seaming and the colors which remind us of the modest monastic clothing. Should modesty and humility be considered the new attributes of the religious influence in fashion or, with some exaggeration, blasphemy?
The dialogue was not a criticism of several cults, nor a fashion show critique, but an analysis of an obvious influence in a culture, which, actively or not, could be considered profoundly religious. Religious icons are not so different from the glossy retouched images in contemporary perfectionist advertising. Both kinds of representations have been created, following the aesthetic codes of their own, to seduce us from their pedestal. Consequently, they have a major influence in our behaviour and in the way we conceive our bodies and they are meant to incite devotion, trying to convince us that we should aspire to be more like them, because they are a better version of ourselves.
Eugen Rădescu is politologist (specialised in moral relativism and political ethics), cultural manager, curator and theoretician. He wrote for various magazines and newspapers. He curated, among others, Bucharest Biennale 1 with the theme “Identity Factories”, “How Innocent Is That?”, “presently i have nothing to show and i’m showing it!” and “Common Nostalgia” at Pavilion Bucharest. He published the book “How Innocent Is That?” at Revolver Book Berlin. He is co-editor of PAVILION – journal for politics and culture and co-director of Bucharest Biennale (with Răzvan Ion) and the chairman of the organisational board of PAVILION and BUCHAREST BIENNALE. He is member of the selection board at apexart for the programs “Franchise” and “Unsolicited Proposal Program”. He held different lectures at several institutions such as apex, New York, Badisher Kunstverein, Karlshrue, Casa Encedida, Madrid, University of Arts, Cluj. Currently he is working on a new book, “Moral relativism – two perspectives”. He is Phd in political science at Babeș-Bolyai University. Also he is professor at Bucharest University and Babeș-Bolyai University, Cluj. Lives and works in Bucharest.
Andreea Pătru is cultural manager and communication and public relations specialist. Presently she is coordinator at PAVILION – centre for contemporary art & culture and executive director of Bucharest Biennale. She participated at ManyFest – Visual Arts Festival, Timișoara and took part in organising NexT, International Film Festival. She holds an MA in audio-visual and multimedia production and she has been published in different newspapers and magazines. In 2011 she graduated SNSPA with the work: “Cult images in the cinematography of Andrei Tarkovsky – a chrono/topogenetic meditation”. She won the CineMAiubit prize for film criticism and is working on a new project “From white cube to black box and vice versa. Image and iconography in cinema and post-cinema”. Currently lives and works in Bucharest.
Saturday October 19th 2013, 3:23 am
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This autumn, on the 10th of October 2013, PAVILION center for contemporary art and culture reopened with a new exhibition, “AFFLUENCE OF THE WORKING CLASS FROM DIFFERENTIATION TO COLLECTIVISM (ON FASHION AND THE POLITICS OF AESTHETICS)”, curated by Răzvan Ion.
Participants: Marina Albu (RO), Maria Balea (RO), Cosmin Grădinariu (RO), Gergő Horváth (RO), Vladislav Mamyshev (RU), Radu Nițescu (RO), Adrian Paci (AL), Corneliu Porumboiu (RO), Andu Simion (RO), Felix Gonzalez-Torres (USA), Wu Tsang (USA)
“The mechanism through which consumption is stimulated often seen as “fashion”, or as a similar concept like “preprogrammed obsolescence”. Definitions of consumerism after the Second World War have distinguished the “fetishizing” of consumption, ideological manipulation of the consumer and rapid increase of human needs. One can argue that this consumerism is an effect of the instability of capitalism and concurrently, of its expansion, while fashion is a battlefield for the emerging new forms of interclass struggles. Fashion is a habit, a collective habit. Modern social codes allow the immediately inferior group to imitate the gestures and preferences of the superior ones. According to this model, groups of higher status are forced to adopt new styles in order to maintain their superiority or distinction,thus tastes strain down the social ladder. This happens periodically, hence a cyclic process is created, generating seemingly mysterious mutations that we call fashion. Fashion is not a bourgeois element, it becomes a necessary luxury.
The affluence of the middle class is seen as a means of imitation – identification with other groups. It is believed that mass production threatens to erode, to absorb, or to trivialise the differences between the classes, transforming the preservation of the ”distinction” into the prerogative of the privileged and elite groups. As a result, those who belong to the subordinate groups, instead of developing their own methods of exclusion, crave the ones from the higher status groups. An effect of reproducing social structures or imitating social behaviours follows close. According to the logic of the egalitarian society, when people don’t have to exhibit the social differences, they will not do so. If the law and the anonymity allow you to “escape” by being anyone you choose to be, then you will not try to redefine yourself. However, egalitarian logic quits functioning when applied to an ancien régime city. Despite the fact that there is a desire to observe dress codes, while doing so, people hope to impose a pattern on the mixture of strangers from the streets.
Răzvan Ion is theoretician, curator, cultural manager and political activist. He is the co-editor of PAVILION – journal for politics and culture, co-director of the BUCHAREST BIENNALE – Bucharest International Biennial for Contemporary Art, and in 2008 was appointed director of PAVILION – the center for contemporary art and culture in Bucharest. He was associate professor at University of California, Berkeley; Lisbon University; Central University of New York; University of London; Sofia University; University of Kiev; etc. He has held conferences and lectures at different art institutions like Witte de With, Rotterdam; Kunsthalle Vienna; Art in General, New York; rum46, Aarhus; Calouste Gulbenkian, Lisbon; la Casa Encedida, Madrid; New Langton, San Francisco; CCA, Tbilisi; Babes-Bolyai University, Cluj; University of Art, Cluj; etc. He writes for different publications and he recently curated ’From Contemplating to Constructing Situations’ and “Exploring the Return of Repression” at PAVILION, Bucharest and rum46, Aarhus. Presently, he is working on the book projects “Exploring the Return of Repression” and “Rhizomic Structures Of Art Institutions. Neo-Politics Of Culture”. He is a professor at the University of Bucharest where he teaches Curatorial Studies and Critical Thinking.
The opening as followed by an after party Reforma, held on PAVILION’s terrace where two of the artist from the exhibition, Andu Simion and Gergő Horváth, mixed live.
The exhibition is now opened for visit until the 16th of February 2014.
On the 21st of June, Marina Albu visited Cluj for the first time to try and raise some questions and to generate a space for debate, through a performance and the connected artistic endeavours.
“For one and a half hour we will try and pinpoint elements that construct our bodies, question their symbolism and roles, turn them on all sides and we will invent new ways to perceive and use them. Also, the unique elements that construct our image will be put on a tray to be chosen one by one, will be picked at or chopped into tiny pieces. We will give out the pieces and than put them back together, test the new method and we will look into the mirror. Anatomy is history and spatial view is physics. We will measure ourselves with our eyes and we will recognize ourselves in others. We will stand our ground, us!” (Marina Albu)
Marina Albu is one of the most interesting artist at the moment. She participated in exhibitions at the Bucharest Biennale 5; Slade Research Centre; The Big Screen Project Sixth Avenue, New York; WHITE BOX Gallery, New York; TR Warsawa, Warsaw; Muzej Vojvodine, Novi Sad; Muzej 25. Maj, Belgrade; Platforma, Bucharest; Fisk Gallery, Bergen; The Victorian Vaults, London; Pavilion, Bucharest; Electroputere, Craiova; Salonul de Proiecte, Bucharest and many others. She works with written text, spoken word, spatial interventions, photography, installations and video. She’s preoccupied with day-to-day life, extra-ordinary events, people and their shaping by external and internal factors, thoughts and occurrences. Some consider her an activist artist, although she would never say something like that about herself. Born in 1984 in Constanța, she lives and works in Bucharest.
Saturday June 15th 2013, 1:05 am
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On the 13th of June, 2013, PAVILION center held a public talk with Răzvan Ion and Andrei Pandele under the title of “Critical social realism or the resistance of the image”.
The mechanical arts stimulate a historically change of artistic paradigm and a new relation between art and its subjects (Walter Benjamin). We must, though, see the things from an opposite perspective. For the mechanical arts to be able to give visibility to the masses, or more so, to the anonymous person, they have to be, first of all, handed and perceived as something other than technics of reproduction or emission. Only then the photography can be regarded as art (Jacques Rancière). The aesthetic and political configuration of Andrei Pandele’s images creates a place for interesting discussions regarding the critical social realism, the aesthetic persistence and the implicit strategy.
The dialogue took place during a unique projection of the images created by Andrei Pandele before 1989.
Andrei Pandele is an architect. From 1968 he started to work in projection institutes, agencies and companies of architecture. During the years 1998 – 2001 he was adjunct chief-architect of Bucharest. Being passionate about photography, Pandele has caught on film thousands of images of the communist regime and he has created photos that have become symbols. In 1975 he traveled with Henri Cartier-Bresson through his journey in Romania. He published several books among which “ Surprise – Witness” and “The House of the People. The end in marble.” His photos participated in several exhibitions, published almost all over the world. Currently, he is still working as an architect in Bucharest.
Razvan Ion is theoretician, curator, cultural manager and political activist. He is the co-editor of PAVILION – Journal for politics and culture, co-director of BUCHAREST BIENNALE – Bucharest International Biennale of contemporary art (with Eugen Rădescu). He was appointed associate professor at University of California, Berkeley, University of Lisbon, Central University of New York, University of London, etc. He has held conferences and talks at a large number of art institutions like Witte de With, Rotterdam; Kunsthalle Vienna; Art In General, New York; rum46, Aarhus; Calouste Gulbenkian, Lisabona; La Casa Encedida, Madrid; New Langton, San Francisco; CCA, Tbilisi, etc. Currently he is professor at University of Bucharest where he teaches curatorial studies and a class of critical thinking.
On the 6th of July, 2013, Cameron H. Rowland, artist-in-residency at Bucharest in the program supported by Art in General, New York and PAVILION, Bucharest, held an artist talk called “Evaluation”.
Through viewing, individuals both participate in and form their social reality. The predominant notion that this is a passive position precludes the possibility of more intentional modes of recognition. I do not intend to collapse the distinction between worker and viewer, but rather assert the essential role of the viewer in defining contemporary experience. Cameron Rowland will discuss image, viewership, and recognition regarding his recent work.
Cameron H. Rowland received a Bachelor degree from Wesleyan University. He is currently an artist-in-residency in the program supported by Art In General, New York and PAVILION, Bucharest. He has recently had solo exhibitions at Wilfred Yang in Los Angeles, California and Appendix Space in Portland, Oregon; and and has participated in group exhibitions at Galerie der HFBK in Hamburg, Germany and Weingrüll in Karlsruhe, Germany. He is a co-editor of The New Document book series. Rowland lives and works in New York.
On the 30th of May, 2013, the director Nicolae Constantin Tanase and Raluca Manescu held an artist talk called “From the classical film structure to newer forms of storytelling” at PAVILION center.
People have been telling the same stories for centuries. In the age of “The holy Internet”, where people are more and more visually entertained it is very hard to keep them happy with just compelling structures, great dialogue and beautiful actors. It is very hard to keep them involved for long periods of time as well (the youtube “click away” problem – “I don`t like it, I don`t have to see it”). We need visual booms to feel entertained. We are brighter than ever (from a cinematic point of view), but also more demanding than ever. Cinema is evolving at a pace where younger filmmakers are freed from the classical compounds that were once a rule. Film-structures, genres and amateurish filming-techniques merge to become a constant surprise for the audience, and thus to keep them entertained. We are a generation with unprecedented freedom to express ourselves – whether we decide to use mobile phones, accessible cameras or the latest ARRI – whether we decide to bring it to the big screen (in cinemas) or on your mobile device – the question is just how you want to tell your story.
Age 27, Nicolae Constantin Tănase graduated the “Film Directing Faculty” within the National University of Theatre and Film I.L. Caragiale, in 2009. His short school project films, “Outrageously Disco” and “Zombie Infectors 3”, had won numerous awards in international festivals. “Blu”, his first short after graduation, brought him the “TRANSILVANIA IFF 2012” – “Best Romanian Short Trophy”, the Jury Award for “Best International Short” in “Cortex Sintra Short Film Festival 2012” and most importantly, “The GOPO Award for Young Promising Talent” in 2013. Nicolae’s feature-debut ,“The World is Mine”, is currently in pre-production with the support of Libra Film and De Film. Nicolae Constantin Tănase is a participant in the current exhibiton at Pavilion, “Common Nostalgia”, curated by Eugen Rădescu.
Raluca Mănescu graduated the “Screenwriting Department” within the National University of Theatre and Film I.L. Caragiale, in 2010. She wrote the script for several award winning short films, working with many young directors – BLU, d. Nicolae Constantin Tănase (“Best Romanian Short Trophy”, TRANSILVANIA IFF 2012, “The GOPO Award for Young Promising Talent” in 2013), Outrageously Disco, d. Nicoalae Constantin Tănase, Vera vs. ursul de biblioteca, d. Luiza Pârvu, Afterparty, d. Ivana Mladenovici. Her feature debut, “The World is Mine”, is now in pre-production.
On the 24th of May, 2013, PAVILION - center for contemporary art and culture took part of Bucharest’s White Night of the Galleries, with a special treat for our visitors, a hopscotch contest with special prizes with PAVILION goodies from our Research Room and a performance and site-specific intervention by Marina Albu called “Scape Goats and Escapist Artists”. Also, the exhibition “COMMON NOSTALGIA” was open until dawn and in the Reforma courtyard people listened to some good music selected by PAVILION team.
On the 16th of May, 2013, PAVILION center held an artist talk with Ștefan Sava under the title: “Missing Originals” about the artistic practices related to the Holocaust.
The problematic of the Holocaust is a theoretical space of reflection strewed with several lacunae and areas of uncertainty. This uncertainty begins at the clear-cut referent of the historic event, not with regards to its facticity (the ‘it did or did not happen’ dispute) but to the way in which this particular event can be absorbed into a much larger cognitive system. The idea itself of an unitary meaning given to the historical event suffers a series of permutations: what represents a mechanism of the process of knowledge easy to infer – a piece of information that tracks the classic layout from the transmitter to the receiver, subjected to the labour of being integrated to a certain type of thinking – is hijacked to alternative tracks of interpretations. Moreover, the tentative of assimilating the subject to the sphere of knowledge is clogged by the necessity of a continuous reconfiguration of the rapport between concepts.
Therefore, the theoretic space brought up by the subject is in a permanent state of movement and is unstable, whilst the performance of key questions at a discursive and analytic level becomes more important than obtaining revealing answers. What may stand as a fundamental feature for modernity can be in fact found in every conceptual sequence of the analysis on Holocaust: the dialectic, pendular and transactional dimension of the way in which the subject is placed in the intimacy of the rapport between present and past, between the lived experience, history and imaginary, between the interior and the exterior of the trauma experience, with consequences that reflect even into the artistic practices that deals with this subject. Consequently, the lecture will be structured around the artistic practices which hold meaning to the Holocaust problematic and will, gradually develop towards other situations in recent history.
Ștefan Sava (n. 1982) lives and works in Bucharest. He holds an MA from the Photo-Video Department, UNARTE Bucharest where he is currently enrolled as a PHD student. His projects combine photography, video, performance and object and are based on a long process of theoretical reflection and research. He is particularly interested in the subject of recent history and in the way in which the history can be visually reactivated through an analytical approach. Among the exhibitions he took part in: From the Backstage, Salonul de proiecte, Bucharest (2012); The Inside-Out of the Wall, Ivan Gallery, Bucharest (2012); Here and Then, Club Electroputere Craiova (2011); Atoms and Void, Galeria Posibilă, Bucharest (2010). Stefan Sava is one of the artists participant of the present exposition curated by Eugen Radescu at Pavilion “Common Nostalgia”. He was selected for the group exposition Europe/South East. Recorded Memories which will open on 24th May at Museum of photography Brauschweig, in collaboration with the University of Art from Brauschweig and the Goethe Institutes from the region.
On the 09th of May, 2013, PAVILION center held a lecture with architect Alexandru Senciuc under the title: “Online activism as a precursor to Foam City”. Afterwards, we officially inaugurated our beautiful courtyard for a session of q&a and further interesting dialogue.
The events from 2011 connected to the “Arab Spring”, to “Occupy Wall Street” or to the “Indignados” movement have demonstrated the potential of online technologies and have raised the next question: can the Internet support the coexistence of different democratic systems? In order to better understand this question I propose a comparative study between online activism and the “Foam City” concept, developed by Peter Sloterdijk in 2004. This concept defines public space as a collector space that allows the simultaneous existence of multiple and often contradictory events, that may be part of different democratic systems.
The hypothesis is that emerging forms of the “Foam City” already exist, especially within online activism. In this sense, the objective is to build a theoretical model that allows the association between the Foam City concept and a series of existent practices and tactics through online technologies. Secondly, this theoretical model of the “invisible mobilisation” acts as an ontological organising system for public space. Through the different ways of cooperation and collaboration defined by online activism, the “invisible mobilisation” model seeks to complete the existing vertical city with an ephemeral, transversal city.
Alexandru Senciuc is an architect and a young researcher in cognitive science. He did three years of studies at UAU “Ion Mincu” in Bucharest and finished the architecture master’s degree with a research mention at ENSA Paris La Villette in 2012. Among his accomplishments we could state the participation at the 2012 Venice Architecture Biennale within the Atelier d’Architecture Autogeree team and the nomination for the Mies van der Rohe 2013 prize for the “Suceava Water Plant” project within the team lead by arch. Constantin Gorcea. Presently he works in Paris, as an architect within the Sensual City Studio / Jacques Ferrier and as a predoctoral researcher within the MAP-MAACC laboratory of CNRS France.
Saturday April 20th 2013, 7:31 am
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On the 18th of April, 2013, PAVILION center held an artist talk with Dan Raul Pintea under the title “Thought is perversion. For it is a product of yesterday”.
Bounded by tradition, thoughts follow culture. The product is a mind with inoculated imagery that shapes our world through corrupted perception. And that’s how you start to judge. I, for instance, confront with such biases often when in public places I hear: “Look. It’s Jesus” or “Make way for Jesus to pass”. And all this, only because I have a beard. I even got almost beaten by some guys on daylight. Visibly scornful, they asked me: ”Hey, don’t you have a shaving blade?” Luckily for me, I was inspired to say that I don’t need it because I’m a priest. I mean come on… don’t they know that also philosophers, writers, artists or hipsters grow beards? Since we are born society assail us with obsolete images, with impersonal energies upon which we build the universe to come. Deliberately or not, we take them. We can’t resist their influence. Because the thought is energy and we are water. And the best way for a thought to dissimulate is to host in water-bearing species.
Accordingly, our thoughts will always be drawn to situations in which we seek for the equivalent image inoculated in our heads. Maybe that’s why I found myself in the position of coping with different motivational images posted by friends on Facebook. I couldn’t help noticing the similitudes of the pictures within the collective conscious so I started to collect them. This is how I observed that we see what we want to see, so mind can achieve the thought already inoculated. This means that we have a destiny to fulfil, future thoughts to accept. That’s the only purpose. Not to live somebody’s energies, their inoculated dreams, to become something we are not. By doing so, we dissimulate life. We build our dreams upon what we learn, see or hear from others. Ignoring ourselves and following reason, we feel miserable. And then we wonder why we feel this way. Define misery: not accomplishing what we already accomplished.
Love can only be when thought is still and this stillness can never be touched by thought. Because everything put together by thought is within the area of noise, so it can in no way make itself still… thought itself must be still for silence to be. Silence is always now as thought is not. Thought, always being old, cannot possibly enter into that silence which is always new.
Dan Raul Pintea was born August 3, 1981, in Romania. He studied fine arts at the University of Arts and Design in Cluj Napoca (RO), where he also got his MA in 2006. He worked there for a year as an Silskscreen Tehnician, but seeing that he cannot develop his own projects he returned to Sibiu, to prioritize his thoughts. Aware of their power he quickly become interested in expressing them through direct, efficient, visual tools. His work and overall approach to art is rather untypical but at the same time they reflect inoculation situations in culture and society. Since 2007 he exhibited at Ivan Gallery (RO), 26 Gallery (RO), Anca Poterasu Gallery (RO), Victoria Art Centre (RO), Sala Dalles (RO), Trypthycon (DE), Visual Kontakt (DE), Program Gallery (PL). Now he is represented by Anca Potersu Gallery, whom he participated with at Preview Art Fair from Berlin, in 2011.
Dan Raul Pintea is a participant in the current exhibiton at Pavilion, “Common Nostalgia”, curated by Eugen Rădescu.
Sunday April 14th 2013, 10:22 pm
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On the 5th of April, 2013, PAVILION center held a lecture by Swel Noury (MAR), under the title “To be faithful or not? Stakes and limits of film adaptation”.
Every time we mention the link between literature and cinema, the most relevant part of the problem seems to be the adaptation. Is it faithful or not to the book?
It is a difficult question because there are several forms of adaptations. So we must introduce the concept of loyalty to figure out what screenwriters try to do every time they work on adapting books. In our case, Swel tried to define the boundaries of adaptation through the movie The Man Who Sold The World.
Based on Dostoyevsky’s short story A Weak Heart, The Man Who Sold The World unfolds as a literary and metaphysical tale of a young clerk, inept to cope with his inner turmoil. As he cannot accept the joy the marriage with a beautiful cabaret performer renders, the protagonist descends into a mental state of delirium and psychosis. Said Bey’s award-winning lead is a staggering demonstration of multi-facetted acting. His feverish appearance is hauntingly captured in painterly influenced wide-lens cinematography, intriguing sound design and a tentative narrative, which seem to confuse not only the film’s declining hero. Set in an anonymous, post-apocalyptic landscape, with a theme reminiscent of Camus, Kafka and Orwell, the film explores the individual’s vulnerability in an autocratic society where love and tolerance are scarce.
Swel Noury is a writer, director and photographer.
He is the son of Hakim Noury, a famous Moroccan film director and Pilar Cazorla, a Spanish producer. Based in Barcelona, he co-directs his movies with his brother Imad. Since their directorial debut HEAVEN’S DOORS (shown in the Official selection of the Berlinale in 2006), Swel & Imad are widely regarded to be the enfants terribles of contemporary Moroccan cinema (Jim Jarmush define them as “visual troublemakers”).
“THE MAN WHO SOLD THE WORLD” was also part of the Official Selection of the Berlinale 2009.
Swel’s photographic work is focused on portraiture and is influenced by Moriyama and Petersen.
Swel Noury is a participant in the current exhibiton at Pavilion, “Common Nostalgia”, curated by Eugen Rădescu.
Saturday April 13th 2013, 2:02 pm
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On April 4th, 2013 PAVILION center for contemporary art and culture reopened after moving to another venue in C.A. Rossetti no. 36 with a new exhibition, “COMMON NOSTALGIA”, curated by Eugen Rădescu.
Photo: Theodor Pană
Photo: Theodor Pană
Participants: Dan Raul Pintea (RO), Ștefan Sava (RO), Nicolae Constantin Tănase (RO), Swel Noury (MAR)
Nostalgia shackles the exercise of the future. Nostalgia, by definition enforces the abdication of perspective and re-penetration of the past. It is some sort of melancholy driven by the wish of re-seeing something or someone from the past; such as when the nostalgic subject goes on with the narcissist identification with the lost object/place; and this subject remains faithful to the lost object, with a pathological wish of not giving up this attachment.
Nostalgia is nor fado, nor the romantic swiss term of “kuhreihen”. I see it more as an “ostalgie”. A common sense of a loss, of a regret – full of demons. I emphasize the antihegelian side of the nostalgia, because the “mourning” and the consciousness of the comeback to the past has the structure of the “overflow” from which the essence of the notion of an object/being is kept. This is how the “mourner” grieves the lost object and “kills it the second time” by the typification and concretisation of its loss. The nostalgic isn’t the one who hasn’t got the power to give up of that something from the past, on the contrary, he “kills the second time” before the object is lost for good.
In the exhibition “Common nostalgia”, which will be open between the 4th of April and the 7th of July 2013, I started from the premise that the subjectifying of the loss and the objectifying of the feeling of losing something could reduce the consistency of the nostalgic type of living, because the exhibited works assume to reach all means of the idea of nostalgia. From “love”, a feeling coming from a casual past, which becomes the subject of what can be assimilated, to the “ostalgie” of the family memories, microcosmos, of a place with your own people. (“Ostalgia” is a sociological german term coming from “nostalgia” and “ost” which means “east”, therefore a nostalgia of the East, in its geopolitical meaning.
Photo: Theodor Pană
Eugen Rădescu is politologist (specialized in moral relativism and political ethics), cultural manager, curator and theoretician. He writes for various magazines and newspapers. He curated, among others, Bucharest Biennale 1 with the theme “Identity Factories”, “How Innocent Is That?” and “presently i have nothig to show and i’m showing it!” at Pavilion Bucharest. He published the book “How Innocent Is That?” at REVOLVER BOOKS Berlin, Germany. He is co-editor of PAVILION – journal for politics and culture and co-director of Bucharest Biennale (with Răzvan Ion) and the chairman of the organizational board of Pavilion and Bucharest Biennale. He is member of a apexart jury at apexart Franchise and Unsolicited Proposal Programs. He had different lectures all around the world, at University of Arts in Cluj, apex, New York, Badisher Kunstverein, Karlshrue, Germania, Casa Encedida, Madrid. Now he is working on a new book, “Moral relativism – two perspectives”. He is professor at Bucharest University and Babes-Bolyai University, Cluj and PhD candidate at Babes-Bolyiai University. Lives and works in Bucharest.
Friday February 15th 2013, 2:09 am
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NICOLAUS SCHAFHAUSEN has held the first press conference as curator of BUCHAREST BIENNALE 6 - Bucharest International Biennial for Contemporary Art on 13 February, 2013 at the new location of PAVILION - Center for Contemporary Art and Culture (Str. C.A. Rosetti nr. 36 A, crossing with Str. Jean Louis Calderon).
BUCHAREST BIENNALE 6 - Bucharest International Biennial for Contemporary Art - is set for May 23 - July 20, 2014, under the curatorship of Nicolaus Schafhausen, director of Kunsthalle Wien. The appointment also will mark the first cooperation of BUCHAREST
BIENNALE and Kunsthalle Wien which will develop a new type of dialogue between Wien and Bucharest.
By appointing such a successful and innovative curator as Nicolaus Schafhausen, BUCHAREST BIENNALE will continue its tradition
of exploring different ways of engaging the city, within a global context. Governing motif of the 6th Bucharest Biennale will be displayed
in various figures of the concept-couple Belonging & Longing. It will focus on topics related to the imperfect/open nature of (national)
identities, the inverse forces of desire for identity and individualism and their structural effects towards our perception of the Other
and the Self.
The press conference has been joined by Răzvan Ion and Eugen Rădescu, the co-directors of BUCHAREST BIENNALE.
Wednesday December 19th 2012, 4:38 am
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On 14th of December, 2012, PAVILION center held a public talk with Răzvan Ion and Eugen Rădescu on the occasion of the relocation of the space.
In a time when reorganizing and resizing are key words in the institutional public discourse, Pavilion reconceptualizes and reinvents a new stage, on the occasion of the relocation of the activities of the art center. Usually, a pavilion is a temporary construction, something in-between a house and a tent with a specific and temporary purpose. Its best quality is functionality, it can be installed and uninstalled easily. It can be moved quickly from a place to another, but it has the potential to mark a certain space, inside or outside the pavilion. It is a temporary structure, as is the exact case of PAVILION, a temporary structure, a temporary platform for contemporary politics, art and culture.
The temporary concept of PAVILION relates perfectly to the concept of today’s cultural (re)presentation. Art and culture are dynamic, temporary, often in a process of transformation, moving not only backwards, forwards, to the right or to the left, but also in each and every way. A temporary structure is needed in order to analyze the contemporary culture – one must be fast and dynamic, and it is needed an environment that is temporary, as the field that it represents, but that must also remain solid.
After 13 years of existence, the two co-founders of the organization held a public Q&A with the audience who supported us for such a long time. It was the last event in the location which hosted us for the last 4 years.
UniCredit Țiriac Bank were generous enough to offer us a new space located at C.A. Rossetti no. 36 Street.
The moving out and refurnishing of the new space will last for an undetermined period of time, therefore the center’s program will be temporary suspended. We will come back with information on the new program and the opening of the new space.
We thank everyone who supported us for the last years. Continue to stand by us!
Răzvan Ion is theoretician, curator, cultural manager and political activist. He is co-editor of the PAVILION – journal for politics and culture, co-director of BUCHAREST BIENNALE – the Bucharest International Biennale of contemporary art (with Eugen Rădescu) and in 2008 he was appointed as director of PAVILION UNICREDIT – center for contemporary art & culture.
Eugen Rădescu (b. 1978) is a politologist ( specialized in moral relativism and political ethics), cultural manager, curator and theoretician. He wrote for different magazines and newspapers. He curated, among others, Bucharest Biennale 1 with the theme “Identity Factories”, the exhibitions “How Innocent is That?” and “presently I have nothing to show and I’m showing it” at Pavilion Bucharest.
Tuesday November 27th 2012, 3:28 am
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On 22nd of November, 2012, PAVILION center held a lecture by Stefan Vianu, under the title Kant after Duchamp? Beyond aesthetic judgement.
By inventing the readymade, Marcel Duchamp brought a new idea into art, moreover, he radically transformed the meaning of art. The most common object can be said to be art in specific contexts. Consequently, the border between art and non-art becomes problematic. However, this doesn’t mean we can’t ask whether an art object presented to us as such is justly qualified as so.
Thierry de Duve explores this matter in his already famous book “Kant after Duchamp”. The author illustrates how the aesthetic judgement “this object is art” replaces the traditional one “this object is beautiful” and stresses the necessity to change the Kantian aesthetic judgement while showing how relevant the Kantian matter is in contemporary art theory: he keeps the aesthetic judgement’s claim on universality as well as its improvable nature.
“The post-modern” condition doesn’t radically alter this observation: whether we left modernity behind or we still feed on its project, the newly formulated aesthetic judgement reinforces the moving of modernity. Which modernity are we talking about though? An in-depth analysis of the link between (modern) art and modernity will allow us to see de Duve’s position in all its complexities and question the situation of modern art which seems to be more complicated than this.
Ștefan Vianu, born in 1963 in Bucharest, studied Theology and Philosophy at the University of Geneva, where he took his PhD in 2001. He worked between 2001 and 2005 at the Philosophy Institute of the Romanian Academy. Currently he teaches the Philosophy of Culture and Aesthetics at “Ion Mincu” University of Architecture in Bucharest.
Tuesday November 27th 2012, 2:21 am
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On 15th November, 2012, PAVILION center held a lecture by Razvan Tupa, under the title Reshaping power and other problems of poetry today.
In front of a church in 2012, some beggar children touch the passers by and “greet” them in a certain way.
Poetry is perceived both as art and arabesque. Order, disorder and authority are three reports that were tracked starting and turning to poetry. Authority, domination, influence are aspects of power. These aspects formulate the rules for operating poetry and, also, the rules of different types of power.
Aristotle distinguishes between cry and voice as among those who are not part of the political community, and those who are included in this community. The “Greeting” of the beggar children makes the transition between the two conditions.
Razvan Tupa (1975) studied History of Religions and Culture and worked as a journalist.
He performs poetry in different places in Bucharest since 1996. He read poetry in Paris, Rome, Prague, New York, Tel Aviv and Berlin. His first collection of poetry was “Fetish” in 2001, awarded ex aequo the “Mihai Eminescu National Award” for first book of poetry. In 2011 he published “Poetic. The Sky in Delft and other Romanian bodies”, a second book of poetry. His poems were selected for “No Longer Poetry- New Romanian Poetry”, an anthology published in UK and “The Vanishing Point that Whistles- An Anthology of Contemporary Romanian Poetry” (Talisman House) in US.
Friday October 19th 2012, 3:27 am
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On October 11, 2012, PAVILION center held a lecture by Ana-Maria Nistor, under the title Distorting and manipulating public opinion through the media.
About our everyday virus, in a humorous manner.
All the press has written about the harmful effects and the distortion of the general point of view… in the press. It is common sense to have knowledge of the horizontality of values and the rude manipulation nowadays, in the sick hunger for sensational. There are literally possibilities for writing anatomical studies upon the spine of those who form the average men’s opinion. The interest fells not on what they actually do, but how they reach the final result.
My proposition for you is neither an academic lecture, nor a tasteless theory, but a journey amongst mass-media’s most attractive sights: a five version news, the tabloid tendency, demystification and the power of nothingness, so-called leaders and anti-leaders, the show of anonymity, the hyper-naturalism and voyeurism of press, men and women’s strategy of manipulating the public point of view. A funny chat about the most important of powers in one’s home: “documented information” and how it modifies us either we like it or not.
Ana-Maria Nistor is Phd. lecturer at the Theatre Faculty of the National University of Theatre and Film “I.L. Caragiale” of Bucharest where she teaches the Universal History of Theatre and a unique discipline in Romania – playwriting and the analysis of the dramatic text. She is theatre critique, playwright, the author of valuable studies, a book upon public – Teatrokratia – and another about The story of the most beautiful plays. She has been collaborator for several newspapers and magazines, Deputy Editor in Chief of two important publications, she wrote TV scripts, theatre adaptations and worked with some of the most important contemporary actors and directors. She coordinated many cultural – amongst others – events, participated in some of the most important theatre festivals and has been a member of numerous juries. Amongst other distinctions, she received the ANOSR Student’s Prize – Bologna Professor – Great Professors who inspire us.
Tuesday October 09th 2012, 1:06 am
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On October 4th, 2012, PAVILION center for contemporary art and culture reopened after the sumer vacation with a new exhibition, ”CRITICAL BOTOX in times of 2.0 feudalism”, curated by Alex Brahim (CO/ES).
Participants: Aggtelek (ES/BE), Anamor (ES), José Begega (ES), Karmelo Bermejo (ES/MX), Zeljko Blace (BA/HR), Lúa Coderch (PE/ES), Andrés Duplat (CO), Juan Pablo Echeverri (CO), Félix Fernández (ES), Jorge García (ES), Miquel García (ES), Andrea Gómez (CO/ES), Núria Güell (ES), Fermín Jiménez Landa (ES), Lydia Lunch (US), Santiago Monge (CO), R. Marcos Mota (ES), Joan Martí Ortega (ES), Daniela Ortiz (PE/ES), Aníbal Parada (AR/ES), Avelino Sala (ES), Andrés Senra (ES), Daniel Silvo (ES), Toni Tena (ES), David Latorre (ES), Oriol Vilanova (ES), Bruce LaBruce (CA)
CRITICAL BOTOX In times of 2.0 feudalism uses a fictional narrative line, a faux gossip magazine, to take its real form as an online process-publication and series of exhibitions, the first of which will take place on October 2012 at Pavilion in Bucharest.
The project is based on the framework of personal, presential relationships that the curator sustains with the artists, whose work is in turn linked, from several thematic axes and production formats, to the political. Understood as a political practice in itself, CRITICAL BOTOX claims the political value of direct human contact in these trying times of virtualization and dehumanization in co-individual interaction.
The online publication uses the aesthetic of gossip magazines as visually distracting sophism, focusing on the reality of the content, the political interests of the work and artist trajectories. It serves, in this way, as a bridge to the different sites and recourses facilitated by the artists to a public that would be interested in exploring each of them. The textual contents emerge from a standard interview answered by all participants.
Each exhibit functions as a sample set of the microcosms implied within this publication. They would also act as a reflection of the heterogeneity in visions and attitudes that stem from contemporary artistic creation to encompass the wide spectrum of the political conditions in a globalized world.
This exhibition at Pavilion shall be accompanied by a printed publication: a fold-out poster with the general structure of the project, a graphic illustration of the relationship framework in CRITICAL BOTOX and texts by guest authors. The graphic design for this project will be handled by Barcelona based studio Los Trini.
During the opening, Anamor, one of the participant artists, held a performance that reacted to the exhibiting works and the conceptual bond between them.
Thursday May 31st 2012, 11:02 pm
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It all started in the morning of May 24th, 2012, with a press conference at Intercontinental Hotel, announcing the opening of BUCHAREST BIENNALE 5. The conference was held by Anne Barlow, curator of BB5, the co-directors and founders, Razvan Ion and Eugen Radescu and the executive director Andrei Craciun.
After the exhibition preview, the sweedish artist, participant within BB5, held his first performance in the frame of the biennale, at Intercontinental Hotel, under the title “Com’on You Reds!”.
Klas Eriksson’s performance “Come’on You Reds”
photo by Sebastian Nitulescu /
EventPHOTO.ro for Vice
Klas Eriksson’s performance “Come’on You Reds”
Photo: Radu Lungu
The night ended with the opening party in Control Club, featuring a live concert of Chinawoman.
In front of Control, the cue for the party…
photo by Sebastian Nitulescu /
EventPHOTO.ro fot Vice
Chinawoman, Photo by Serban Nitulescu for Vice
Chinawoman, Photo by Serban Nitulescu for Vice
Chinawoman, Photo by Serban Nitulescu for Vice
On May 25th Klas Eriksson held his second performance, “Curva Viola” within the frame of BB5, at Make a Point, in Pantelimon, Bucharest.
Wednesday May 30th 2012, 6:31 am
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On May 24th, 2012, BUCHAREST BIENNALE 5 opened with an exhibition preview day for the press and professionals. The exhibition consists in works from 19 artists, exhibited in 7 different venues around Bucharest.
Cinema Union, work by Aurélien Fromént.
PAVILION, works by Ahmet Öğüt and Alexandre Singh.
PAVILION, works by Ahmet Öğüt,
Alexandre Singh and Rinus Van de Velde
Make a Point, work by Wael Shawky.
Make a Point, works by Mounira Al Solh & Bassam Ramlawi
and Klas Eriksson.
The House of the Free Press,
work by Marina Naprushkina
The House of the Free Press,
works by David Maljković.
The House of the Free Press,
works by Vesna Pavlović and Abbas Akhavan
The House of the Free Press,
work by Jill Magid. Courtesy of BB5
The House of the Free Press,
works by Abbas Akhavan.
Alert Studio, work by Haris Epaminonda.
The Institute for Political Research,
work by Janice Kerbel.
The Institute for Political Research,
work by Ciprian Homorodean.
The Institute for Political Research,
work by Anahita Razmi.
The Institute for Political Research,
work by Marina Albu.
Wednesday May 30th 2012, 4:35 am
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On May 24th BUCHAREST BIENNALE 5 Tactics for the Here and Now, curated by Anne Barlow, opened it’s doors with a preview day preceded by a press conference at Intercontinental Hotel. At the press conference, the curator of BB5, Anne Barlow together with the co - directors and founders of the organization, Razvan Ion and Eugen Radescu and executive director Andrei Craciun, announced the opening of the biennale and discussed with the attending press and professionals the aims of the project and the conditions in which it has been implemented.
On 1st of May, the BB5 team started to install the exhibition TACTICS FOR THE HERE AND NOW, the heart of the fifth edition of BUCHAREST BIENNALE.
The first work to cover the exhibition walls, was untitled (The Lost Bishop), by the belgian artist Rinus Van de Velde.
Rinus Van de Velde (BE) drawing
BB5, curated by Anne Barlow, will open on May 25th and will take place in 7 venues around Bucharest, exhibiting the works of 19 artists from 19 countries from around the world.
For more details, please visit:
www.bucharestbiennale.org
Installing David Maljkovic’s work
in the Free Press House
Installing Abbas Akhavan’s work
in the Free Press House
Installing Alexandre Singh’s work
at PAVILION center
On March 15, 2012, PAVILION center hosted a lecture by Robert Marin, under the title Architecture Politics / Cultivating Ideas, in the frame of the exhibition Sheltered.
For centuries, the way the people lived it was the direct result of the way they worked.The house, as permanent living space, exclusively dedicated to rest and family activities, it is a relative new conversion and in terms of historical evolution, represents the remains of outsourcing lucrative work , education and sick care, to other institutions. The loss of many old functions in this social weaving, left room for new and different ways of conceptualizing housing, some rejected as utopian, some gradually accepted, some so recent, that only now are under test. To what degree there are solutions among so many proposals, is a personal decision, since individual housing concept is major influenced by individual choices. I suggest to take a look at some contemporary domestic architecture solutions, to identify the motivation and arguments of those involved in the process, and if it’s the case, to compare them with personal opinions on the topic.
Robert Marin (b. 1976) is a Bucharest based architect. He received his architecture diploma from UAIM Bucharest in 2001 and cofounded in the same year the architecture and design studio Square One. As principal architect of the office he received international recognition trough works widely publicized in professional books and magazines across the globe. Among the most important distinctions he can include the Bucharest Architecture Biennale first prize in Interior Architecture, the Henkel Art Prize and the Contractworld finalist. In 2008 he cofounded the architecture and design practice Nuca Studio in which he acts presently as principal architect.
On 1st of March, 2012, PAVILION center for contemporary art and culture opened a new exhibition, created by Robert Marin & Nuca Studio, with the title “Sheltered”.
In a critique to modernity, the German sociologist Ulrich Beck introduced the term “The Age of And” to describe the generalized additive character of the people’s perception of themselves and the things belonging to them . Beck considers that the actions of the members of today’s society are almost exclusively pointed towards accumulation and this trend is specific to our age. This mutations in the way we perceive our social footprint led to spectacular transformations in the way we define comfort and since the architectural space is generated to respond to the needs of its occupants in certain comfort parameters we witnessed an incredible global inflammation of the constructed space in the past decade.
“Sheltered” is a small initiative that attempts to confront its visitors with the basics of human space needs in order to reactivate in each observer the primary tools of space analysis. The way we acknowledge our relationship with our immediate boundaries is definitive in our positioning in today’s world. The contemporary idea of shelter, house or personal space is the result of a continuous extension of their meaning by integrating alongside higher standards in ergonomics and risk management a huge amount of made up commercial criteria destined to dilate the apparent needs of the user. To be able to debate such matters we first need to take a look at our own satisfaction criteria regarding our basic needs for space.
The exposition is structured in two segments. The first one consists in two surfaces that trough their relationship creates narrow or wide spaces designed to engage the visitor in a direct experience of minimum space requirements. And a second one conceived as a “game” in which the visitor can intervene in different models that recreates “fit in” situations for some abstract characters.
Robert Marin (b. 1976) is a Bucharest based architect. He received his architecture diploma from UAIM Bucharest in 2001 and cofounded in the same year the architecture and design studio Square One. As principal architect of the office he received international recognition trough works widely publicized in professional books and magazines across the globe. Among the most important distinctions he can include the Bucharest Architecture Biennale first prize in Interior Architecture, the Henkel Art Prize and the Contractworld finalist. In 2008 he cofounded the architecture and design practice Nuca Studio in which he acts presently as principal architect.
Wednesday February 29th 2012, 2:33 am
Filed under: None
Razvan Ion, director of BUCHAREST BIENNALE and Anne Barlow, curator of BB5, were invited by BAM, Flemish Institute for Visual, Audiovisual and Media Art, in a research visit in Belgium.
Anne Barlow in the studio of Agency, with Kobe Matthys
Anne Barlow in the studio of Rinus van der Velde
Razvan Ion and Rinus van der Velde in the artist’s studio
Saturday February 18th 2012, 6:35 am
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Thursday, February 16, 2012, Anne Barlow, the appointed curator of BUCHAREST BIENNALE 5, announced in a press conference the list of participating artists, the venues and new details about the concept of BUCHAREST BIENNALE 5 - Bucharest International Biennial for Contemporary Art. At the conference, also participated Razvan Ion & Eugen Radescu, co-Directors of BUCHAREST BIENNALE, Ramona Macarie and Andrei Craciun, the Executive Directors and Catalina Miciu, Internal and Online Communication Associate at UniCredit Tiriac Bank.
Monday February 13th 2012, 7:37 am
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On Febryary 9 PAVILION - center for contemporary art and culture hosted a lecture by Marius Stan, with the title Memory and Politics of Memory: a Hang Tag.
Memory labels a wide variety of phenomena. You remember how to play GO after many years of idleness. You remember to call your parents when every of their anniversaries. You evoke the maidans where you used to play ball in your boyhood days. You retrace a flavour, a colour, a feeling… you bethink the 1989 events through the medium of certain time and praxis. Nonetheless lots of things happen – as Wittgenstein would assert – when we recollect.
When the reminiscence is acquired through some political means, it takes the shape of the so-called politics of memory. Or when the reminiscence coalesces into art becoming its object, we can ultimately state something about an art of memorialisation. All these employments are using interpretations and reinterpretations of some past symbols, whilst the memory on the whole is nothing else than a complex process wherein selection plays a decisive role. Being a trial experience par excellence, the memory could retrospect to the cast of the one who makes the selection. Notwithstanding, who is to say which elements are retainable as public memento and whichever should be blotted out or forgotten? That memory of a certain kind and shape could unintentionally arise within this “lab”, is another plausible fact. But things can be intended and unintended at a time, whilst certain “vernacular memories” of some major events could remain quite different from the official historical commemoration.
As oration of any common narrator used to facing the past, “Memory and Politics of Memory: a Hang Tag” tries to retell to the unforgetting ones how exactly the post-communist Romania has condescended to recollect its recent history in the aforementioned ways: politically and artistically! In other words, to provide answers to at least two fundamental questions: what and how exactly did we manage to politically recall in relation to the communist period? What and how exactly did we manage to artistically recall in relation to the communist period? Thus the political and artistic awakenings of the past as means to a post-communist establishment of some memorial typologies shall be explored.
Marius Stan holds a PhD in political sciences from the Faculty of Political Sciences – Bucharest University (with a thesis on the administration of the past in Serbia and the functioning of the ICTY), and currently works as a researcher within the Institute for the Investigation of Communist Crimes and the Memory of the Romanian Exile wherefrom he has published several articles and other writings on the history of communism in Romania. He has published many studies about the penitentiary system, re-education by means of torture, and the communist repression in Romania; he also coordinates the international journal History of Communism in Europe. He co-authored two volumes of the The Dictionary of the Officers and Civil Employees belonging to the General Directorate of the Penitentiaries. Central Apparatus: 1948-1989, Iași: Polirom, 2009/ 2011.
Starting with 2006 he is a member and spokesman of the civic movement “Miliția Spirituală” (“Spiritual Militia”).
Among his fields of interest should be mentioned few educational and memorial projects (http://istoriacomunismului.ro/#/home; http://www.memoryofnation.eu/), the socio-political transformations in post-communist Europe and transitional studies – general (Romania/Serbia – in particular).
Tuesday January 17th 2012, 4:33 am
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On January 12 PAVILION UNICREDIT hosted a lecture by Niels Van Tomme, with the title The Aporia of Curating, within the frame of the exhibition Melancholy is not enough….
Instead of installing concepts with certainty and curatorial authority, what would result in introducing doubt and hesitation as the ruling principles of exhibition making? What kind of knowledge can be acquired from such a skeptical curatorial position? Does it mean that the exhibition will necessarily collapse into itself, or are there other modes of exhibition making, and experiencing, attainable?
Niels Van Tomme is a New York based curator, researcher, and critic. Most recently, he curated the exhibition “Where Do We Migrate To?”, which premiered at the Center for Art, Design and Visual Culture in Baltimore and will travel to Parsons The New School of Design in New York, the CAC in New Orleans, and the Rubin Center for Visual Arts in El Paso. He is a Contributing Editor of Art Papers and publishes internationally in journals, magazines, and exhibition catalogues. Van Tomme is currently co-editing the book Aesthetic Justice, forthcoming from Antennae Series by Valiz, Amsterdam, in 2012.
Tuesday December 20th 2011, 4:29 am
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On December 15, 2011, PAVILION UNICREDIT opened “Melancholy is not enough…”, a new exhibition curated by Niels Van Tomme.
Participants: Lotte Van den Audenaeren (BE), Anne-James Chaton (FR), Andrea Galvani (IT), Jo Mitchell (UK), Matthias Wermke & Mischa Leinkauf (DE).
“A sorrowful pleasure”, according to Bulgarian-French theorist Julia Kristeva, melancholy is assumed to exclude any action. Besieged by one’s grievous state, one can’t react with or against this all-pervasive affective condition. Turning away from deliberately finding pleasure in overpowering sentiments and environments, as the melancholic subject is expected to in most conceptualizations of her state, the artists in this exhibition subvert the looming of melancholia into delight, relentlessly relating the physical places they navigate to the mental states they desire to appropriate.
From left to right: Eugen Radescu, Andrei Craciun, Razvan Ion, Anca Nuta
A special guest, Anne Barlow, the curator of BB5
Anne Barlow and Razvan Ion
“The exhibition, introduces an ambiguous site of insubordinate gestures, offering potential models to establish a position that merges tactical distrust with poetic action. Propagating ideas of imbalance and disobedience, it is a celebration of practical invention and moral resistance—the conquest of time over subjugation, and of defiance over sorrow—and the vast realization that melancholy is, indeed, not enough.”
Extract from the exhibition publication
Text by Niels Van Tomme
Thursday November 10th 2011, 6:03 am
Filed under: None
On 27th of October, 2011, PAVILION UNICREDIT presented in the frame of the exhibition presently i have nothing to show and i’m showing it! an artist talk with Marina Naprushkina in dialogue with Eugen Radescu.
A discussion about a not so close reality, about a closed society and about how we can manage to discuss arguments about a real democracy when we have to deal with failure of democratic lessons.
“The Office for Anti-Propaganda” was founded in 2007 in Frankfurt. The “Office” produces an archive of videos, texts and picture material on the subject of political propaganda. The focus is on Belarus because but its political model can be transferred to some other East European and Latin American countries from which Belarus gets political support. Belarus is also an outstanding example of how to establish a modern dictatorship and how the western democracies handle this “problem”. “The Office for Anti-Propaganda” is the result of long-standing work in gathering and archiving the original propaganda material and the works of the artists. It is shown in the form of an installation with an archive, which every viewer can use: select and watch the videos, read correspondence between the office and German authorities, or page through the original Belorussian “patriotic” ideological literature.
Marina Naprushkina, born 1981 in Minsk, Belarus. Her works is a range of media including painting, video and installation to develop critical examinations of power and the structure of the State, often using material acquired from contemporary Belarus. A rich source is the propagandistic material delivered by governmental institutions. There so obtained images and symbols become either slightly changed or inserted in a different context in order to reverse the original message. The artist’s painstaking dissection of the visual and linguistic structure of the authoritarian regime and research-based works demonstrate how state authority affects society, and transforms democracy into an illusion for those living under the persistent hegemony of the ruling network.
Eugen Radescu (b. 1978) is politologist (specialized in moral relativism and political ethics), cultural manager, curator and theoretician. He writes for various magazines and newspapers. He curated, among others, Bucharest Biennale 1 with the theme “Identity Factories” and “How Innocent Is That?” at Pavilion Bucharest. He published a book “How Innocent Is That?” at REVOLVER BOOKS, Berlin, Germany. He is co-editor of PAVILION – journal for politics and culture and co-director of Bucharest Biennale (with Razvan Ion) and the chairman of the organizational board of Pavilion and Bucharest Biennale. He is associate professor at Bucharest University and Babes-Bolyai University, Cluj. Lives and works in Bucharest.
Wednesday November 02nd 2011, 6:03 am
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On October 5, 2011, PAVILION UNICREDIT hosted the first event from PAVILION MUSIC series, a dialogue between NEUROTIC MASS MOVEMENT and Andrei Craciun, under the title Tragic Machine.
A talk focused on the political issues and critical thinking of the musical scene. Analyzing the representational strategies, the dialogue exlppored topics, such as the nature and state of independent music, racism and sexism in the music business and the marketing of non-white and politically motivated artists.
The London based band, NEUROTIC MASS MOVEMENT comprises of the songwriting partnership of Yin Neurotic and David Neurotic. Together they have developed an emotional and intuitive approach to music which has to be seen, heard and witnessed. Singer Yin Neurotic iconoclastic live performances and David Neurotics uncompromising musicianship underpins and cajoles the NMM sound. Asked recently in an interview what his guitar influences were, he said: “there are many influences, but Tristan Tzara, Le Tonneau de la Haine and Scooby Doo, spring to mind”…
Wednesday November 02nd 2011, 5:46 am
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On Spetember 29, 2011, PAVILION UNICREDIT hosted a discussion between Razvan Ion and Adreea Grecu about the current status quo of the Romanian cultural scene.
Andreea Grecu and Razvan Ion are professors at University of Bucharest. Andreea Grecu is a cultural manager and former director of Ntional Cultural Fund. Razvan Ion is co-editor of Pavilion – journal for politics and culture.
Wednesday November 02nd 2011, 5:41 am
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On September 22 PAVILION UNICREDIT reopened after the summer vacation with a new exhibition curated by Eugen Radescu under the title presently I have nothing to show and I’m showing it!.
Participants: Rainer Werner Fassbinder (DE), Isidore Isou (FR), Marina Albu (RO), Marina Naprushkina (BY/DE), Alfred Jarry (FR), Juan delGado (ES/UK).
Marina Albu, one of the participant artists, presented at the opening of the show her newest performance, My Ego on a Stick.
“PRESENTLY I HAVE NOTHING TO SHOW AND I’M SHOWING IT!” is a commercial slogan made by Ghislain Mollet-Vieville, meant to draw attention upon the necessity of promoting art through all means so that it becomes as known as possible to the public.
The morphic field
“We refuse to discuss. Human relationships must have passion, if not terror, as foundation.” (Isidore Isou). The “egregore” as a steady element of the morphic field needs an interactive game between the different specifications of concepts used in the branches of social, art, politics, economics, social, culture, the progress game, the postmodern non-action and the branches of new technologies – all imply a theoretically amplified construct. Mediation, as Jean-Jacques Gleizal says, cannot be seen as a goal per se. It systematizes the relation between art and society through raising questions concerning art’s capacity to regulate or, why not, to disturb the society. Through methodological tricks, mediation interiorizes politics, but the reversed relation is also true: politics interiorizes art. Contemporary art has an essential trait: it is situated at the antipode of estheticism, which leads to a different approach , moreover, contemporary art discusses/disputes/questions democracy. The essential question raised for debate by the exhibition “presently I have nothing to show and i’m showing it!” is that that if nowadays we assist at a reconstruction of basic concepts of contemporary art, if art still is a hidden motive of cultural and moral progress of a society, if art still is an easily valuable branch whenever we speak about all forms of progress. (Eugen Radescu)
Tuesday August 02nd 2011, 4:11 am
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On June 10, PAVILION UNICREDIT took part of Bucharest’s White Night of the Galleries, with a special treat for our visitors, a hopscotch contest with special prizes with PAVILION goodies and a live act of MINUS and Montgomery Clunk.
DJ Set with Minus & Montgomery Clunk
www.soundcloud.com/minus
www.soundcloud.com/montgomery-clunk
Tuesday August 02nd 2011, 3:57 am
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On June 16 PAVILION UNICREDIT hosted a lecture by Jose Antonio Fernandes Dias, with the title Curating the Global, within the frame of Free Academy.
Starting from a long look and deep description of a work by Yinka Shonibare, “The Scramble for Africa”, 2000-2003, we will re-visit some of the main questions introduced in art practice and curating by globalization. Focusing on “modernist primitivisms” retro-prospectively, as a particular and relevant moment for our present condition of globality.
Jose Antonio Fernandes Dias, anthropologist and professor at the Faculty of Fine Arts in Lisbon, where he coordinates the MA in Curatorial Studies. He is author of essays published in several countries, in books, magazines and catalogues, on Anthropology and Art, Museology, Curating, Post-Colonial Studies. As a curator, he’s part of the team coordinating the project artafrica, and is a consultant in the Department of Fine Arts from the Gulbenkian Foundation. He is curator of several exhibitions in Portugal and abroad. Currently is the head of the project Africa.cont. Lives and works in Lisbon.
Tuesday August 02nd 2011, 3:50 am
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On Thursday, June 16, PAVILION UNICREDIT hosted a lecture by Alex Brahim, under the title Histeria - Historia.
A talk discussing artists, writers, filmmakers who have dared to tell the truth in especially turbulent times. Now more than ever as we are lied to, manipulated by propaganda, distracted by the over abundance of the latest techno-gadgets, inundated by pointless pop culture and forced into feelings of impotency as we become overwhelmed by the state of global collapse. Works and artists who seek to inspire individuals to come forward in artistic protest, lending a personal voice to history which illustrates the fear, rage and sorrow of the human condition in these trying times.
Alex Brahim is an independent theoretician and curator from Columbia. Lives and works in Barcelona, Spain.
Thursday June 09th 2011, 5:34 am
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On June 07, PAVILION UNICREDIT hosted an artist talk about the recent changes and turns in the art practice and their projections into or outside the socio-political sphere. Moderated by Razvan Ion, within the frame of the exhibition FROM CONTEMPLATING TO CONSTRUCTING SITUATIONS.
Jason Loebs is an artist in residence at PAVILION UNICREDIT within the residency exchange program with ART IN GENERAL, New York. He uses various media: painting, collage, installation, mixed media, exploring the ways through which the present is constructed by reconfiguring the past. His works have been recently shown in Voxpopuli, Philadelphia, Evanston Art Center and New Jersey Museum for Contemporary Art. He is currently part of the Whitney Museum Independent Study Program. Lives and works in Brooklyn, NY.
Kant was the one who launched the interrogation on our knowledge’s conditions of possibility and the one who explicitly understood this interrogation as being a critical act. From now on, we can say that the modern reflection is either critical - in this auto-reflective sense- or it is not modern. (Boris Buden) But, the freudian, foucaultian, postmodern, stalinist, leninist repression etc. is identical, and what can make a difference is the astonishment of the self and the possibility to say “no” to the oppressive state (without transforming this into an anarchist wailing ). Too much blood has been spilled to let the art and the revolutionary machine be set apart. The move from the contemplation of a situation to its representation, must be made immediately.
The reader and it’s physical projection, the exhibition, deals with different generations of artists and thinkers which refuse to participate in the tired prescriptions of marketplace and authority and instead create radical new methods of engagement. The concept try to develops an indispensable, contemporary conception of political change, a conception that transcends the outmoded formulations of insurrection and resistance. I believe too much blood and ink has been shed for the art machines and the revolutionary machines to remain separate. (Razvan Ion)
(from left to right) Anca Nuta, Eugen Radescu,
Razvan Ion, Jason Loebs, Andrei Craciun
Razvan Ion, Director of PAVILION UNICREDIT and curator of the show.
On 31st of May, 2011, PAVILION UNICREDIT hosted the press conference in which, Anne Barlow, the appointed curator of BUCHAREST BIENNALE 5, presented the concept of the biennale, under the title TACTICS FOR HERE AND NOW.
Anne Barlow (born in Glasgow, Scotland), the appointed Curator of BB5, is Executive Director of Art in General, New York.
After receiving an M. A. in the History of Art at the University of Glasgow, Scotland, Barlow acted as Curator of the Scottish Arts Council Collection of contemporary art (1989-1994) and Curator of Contemporary Art and Design at Glasgow Museums (1994-1999), where she managed a temporary exhibitions program, contemporary art and design collection, artists’ residencies, and new commissions. From 1999-2006, she was Curator of Education and Media Programs at the New Museum, New York, where she oversaw the scope of the museum’s educational and public programs; initiated and developed Museum as Hub, a global network initiative that connected the museum with international contemporary art partners in Cairo, Eindhoven, Mexico City and Seoul; organized inter-disciplinary roundtables with leaders in the fields of the visual arts, architecture, and design; and curated numerous exhibitions and performances.
Independently, she also collaborated on the exhibition Copy It, Steal It, Share it at Borusan Art Gallery, Istanbul (2003), and guest-curated film and media projects for Threshold Artspace, Perth, Scotland (2007). Barlow has published for organizations including Liverpool University Press/Tate Gallery Liverpool; the Henry Moore Institute, Leeds, United Kingdom; the Edith Russ House for Media Art, Oldenburg; the New Museum, New York; and Art in General. She was also a lecturer/ guest critic for organizations including the Royal College of Art, London; Centre for Contemporary Art, Warsaw; MUMOK, Vienna; New York University; The Cooper Union for the Advancement of Science and Art, New York; and Tate Modern, London.
TACTICS FOR THE HERE AND NOW
Within the current context of the shifting nature of economics, society and culture—situations that often referred to as “precarious times”— artists often have to negotiate risky positions, contested territories, or situations in which cultural activity interacts with, or provides a counterpoint to, conditions of flux. Within this context, Bucharest Biennale 5 profiles the work of artists whose agency lies not necessarily in overt statements, but rather in investigative, indirect, or informal strategies that possess their own kind of power.
By nature, work that is investigative is slow in the making, expressing a kind of resistance to both the speed and changing nature of things and the increasing sense of instability that pervades everyday life. The act of researching, uncovering, and presenting things that are just below the surface—an activity that has been aided by the Internet as a space in which artists can more actively seek out information that is “missing or hidden” —defines the way in which many artists work today. On one hand, this can an element of rumor, secrets being revealed through seduction or manipulation, or ideas that are communicated or altered in some way through transmission. On the other, it can be seen as a reworking of specific histories, from the civic to the personal, that produce a different kind of “knowledge” that is not necessarily about nostalgia or narrative , but more about presenting a complex and contemporary perspective on life. Artists’ projects for specific spaces and contexts in Bucharest will draw on a variety of sources and sites, as a way of refreshing dialogue around older topics, re-imagining specific narratives, or proposing new ones.
Often, artists also circumvent existing systems as a way of responding to social and political contexts that are less predictable. Their way of working reflects a practice that is more “evolving, dynamic and responsive, difficult to pin down, essential for situations that change quickly or are not yet fully understood.” For some artists, working with informal structures means working together, for others, it means developing approaches that are distinctly personal and individual. The deployment of informal strategies is something that is resonant in a city such as Bucharest, among others, where more formal systems do not necessarily seem to support the most experimental art practice.
In terms of its format, the Biennale will be developed around a number of core commissioned projects that will take place in identified sites such Pavilion and other educational contexts, and ideally public venues and spaces in the city, such as public squares, billboards, media screens, and storefronts. While the visual arts form the core of the Biennale, other disciplines such as literature and film will be woven into the overall program, providing a format that involves an ‘exhibition’ at the opening but that also develops dynamically over the duration of the biennale.
The education program will manifest itself in the biennale through the creation of “spaces for thinking” in the way in which both the exhibition and public programs are put together. The Biennale program will arouse public curiosity and greater engagement through various means: components that evolve over time or that draw on the idea of repetition; modes of engagement that are both formal and informal in structure; connectivity to other disciplines; longer-term involvement by artists through specific relationships with partner institutions/sites; and elements of surprise and playfulness in addition to more theory-based events; and public events and projects.
The notion of the informal builds on existing strategies evident in Bucharest, and it is a clear component of Pavilion’s Free Academy: “What makes the difference between the formal system proposed by the official state power network through the ministry and informal education, proposed by the Free Academy project, is the creation of what appears in the educational discourse as an “active citizen”- that type of citizen that participates in the social debate, that is an agent of change, that proposes the terms of development, that has the attitude resources and competences to get involved.” (Eugen Radescu)
Saturday June 04th 2011, 5:27 am
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On May 12, 2011, PAVILION UNICREDIT proudly hosted a lecture by one of our former interns, Ana Dabija, with the title Exposure therapy: the dispersed museum.
Ana Dabija was born in 1985 and has graduated the Univerisity of Architecture and Urbanism “Ion Mincu” in Bucharest.
PAVILION is pleased to welcome Jason Loebs, New York based artist, for his research visit in Bucharest. He arrived Sunday, on April 10 and is going to stay in Romania until April 25, preparing for his residency in Bucharest, which will take place in June-July 2011.
Starting with 2011, PAVILION UNICREDIT is honored to be a part of the program Eastern European Residency Exchange (EERE) of Art-in-General, New York. EERE offers artists the opportunity to create new works in new contexts and to interact with artistic communities in New York, Bucharest and Zagreb.
During this first residency exchange, Ioana Nemes will live in new York between March-April 2011 as a guest artist at Art in General. The result of her activity in the frame of the residency is represented by the solo show “Times Colliding”, curated by Courtenay Finn and hosted by Art in General between March 25th - May 7th, 2011.
During the same program, American artist Jason Loebs was selected by PAVILION for a residency in Bucharest between June - July 2011. Loebs will complete a work specially commissioned for the exhibition “From Representing to Constructing Situations” between June 2nd - July 31st 2011, curated by Razvan Ion at PAVILION UNICREDIT - center for contemporary art&culture. Loebs will also publish a series of works in PAVILION - journal for politics and culture and will hold an artist talk at PAVILION UNICREDIT.
Ioana Nemes (b. 1979 Bucharest, Romania) is one the most appreciated Romanian artists of her generation. Her works have been exhibited at SecessionVienna (2010), Istanbul Biennial (2009), Smart Project Space Amsterdam (2009), U-Turn Copenhagen (2008), Prague Biennial (2007), Bucharest Biennial (2006), and Kunsthalle Fridericianum, Kassel (2006). She was artist-in-residence at IASPIS Stockholm (2010) and Kulturkontakt Vienna (2004) and received Future of Europe Art Prize from Galerie Für Zeitgenössische Kunst, Leipzig (2007).
Jason Loebs is an artist based in New York. Loebs received his Certificate in Painting from the Pennsylvania Academy of The Fine Arts in 2004 and his MFA from the The Art Institute of Chicago in 2007 he is now participant in the Whitney Independent Study Program. He has participated in group exhibitions at Artist Space, Exhibition 211, Bortolami gallery, Voxpopuli (Philadelphia), Harris Leberman Gallery and Kavi Gupta Gallery (Chicago & Berlin).
Eastern European Residency Exchange is supported by Trust for Mutual Understanding and The Pollock-Krasner Foundation.
On March 30, under the umbrella of her alter-ego Femme Façade, Valerie Renay held an Q&A moderated by Razvan Ion and hosted by PAVILION UNICREDIT. On 31st of March she performed her new show MY BLOOD IS THICKED THAN YOURS in Control Club, Bucharest.
Valeray Renay (left) and Razvan Ion (right)
Performer, film director, writer and half of art rock duo Noblesse Oblige, the mixed race French-Caribbean artist Valerie Renay spent half her life in London where she trained in acting (with Phillippe Gaulier) movement (with Contact impro/Body Weather) and voice.
In London, Valerie also hosted cabaret nights (Whoopee) and events such as Gay Shame (Duckie). She stars in Edwin Brienen’s arthouse movie L’amour Toujours (2008).
Valerie is also regularly DJ’ing on the European club circuit. As a French pop expert she plays an eclectic mix of tasty electro rock indie classics with a pinch of weirdness and underground touch.
Now based in Berlin she has re-emerge as her alter ego Femme Façade making regular appearances at underground clubs, fashion shows, art galleries, as well as international performance festivals such as Contradança Asta Festival, Portugal and The New Burlesque Festival, Denmark (featured on Danish national TV).
Femme Façade’s new performance My Blood is Thicker than Yours intertwines the result of her research into voodoo practices and her own specific sense of aesthetic and stylised world. Valerie Renay explores the notion of belief, female power, ethnicity, life, and death through the re-enactment of a ritualistic sacrifice.
On March 10, 2011, PAVILION UNICREDIT opened Just Do It. Biopolitical Branding, an exhibition curated by Simina Neagu.
Participants: Freee (UK), Center for Tactical Magic (US), Foundland (NL), Metahaven (NL), Bureau for Melodramatic Research (RO)
The city presents itself as a semiotic jungle, laden with logos that guide your path through the use of “soft power”. No longer compelled to act according to set values, the citizen-cum-consumer is persuaded to assert its own identity by consumption. But how can logos or symbols exert such influence and most importantly, are we to accept this influence as wholly positive? In order to answer these questions and analyze the mechanisms through which corporate organizations and the prevalent phenomenon of branding shape the social imaginary, artists and researchers choose different strategies of appropriation or resistance. From Metahaven’s analysis of visual identity to Freee’s critique of advertising, this exhibition tries to act as a toolkit for operating in a neo-liberal environment. Far from being a visual manifestation of anti-corporate activism, the presented works fluctuate between protest and over-identification, engaging the viewer in a variety of discourses.
The work of the Georgian artist, Lado Darakhvelidze, Rubik’s Cube. New State Symbols, was donated through the artist’s initiative and PAVILION’s support to the House for Abandoned Children “Sf. Nicolae” from Bucharest.
The donated work was produced within the frame of the exhibition Utopia of Exotic.
Thursday February 17th 2011, 4:42 am
Filed under: None
On February 10, PAVILION UNICREDIT hosted Frontiers as a Game for Social Change, an artist talk held by Karl Zechenter, one of the members of the group gold extra (A). The event took place in the frame of the exhibition Utopia of Exotic.
“The revolution will not be televised - instead it’ll come with a game pad” - The computer-game Frontiers by the Austrian artist group gold extra lets its players experience European border zones performing the roles of refugees or border guards respectively. The game allows for a new perspective in an artistic and gaming context: Frontiers modifies the shooter-genre and lets its players face the question just how much reality they can afford within a computer-game. Purposefully put between the functionality of games and the approach of fine arts, Frontiers is presented e.g. in the permanent exhibition at ZKM Karlsruhe. One of the producers of the game, Karl Zechenter, speaks in his lecture about researching and developping the game, the context of political games and the techniques of modding as seen in Frontiers.
Karl Zechenter (*1972) lives in Salzburg (A), studied literature and political sciences and works as a movie director and curator.
from left to right: Yoshinori Niwa,
Razvan Ion, Andrei Craciun, Eugen Radescu
The exotic subject, whatever it may be, is first assigned two essential qualities, namely the great distance between the analytical entity and the formal unusual/weird characteristics. But the farther an object is from the analyst, the less worthy it becomes of being examined. The proposition of knowledge is substituted by the proposition of indifference and superficiality of being known. When we talk of nation-states-societies we can easily say that pursuing naively an utopian system of values, one could imagine that exoticism implies a certain type of reciprocity between subject and analyst. Somewhere along the way a vague connection is established between the one being determined and the one that determines. Nonetheless Western society has assumed the role of absolute analyst. Thus, the type of relation towards the apparently exotic space modifies its assessment parameters…
Therefore throughout history, exotic space was a locus of social, economic and political experiments, generated by utopian ideas and ideologies. The hypothesis of potential for non-Western space to transform into a social paradise was demolished by twentieth-century history through violent and traumatizing arguments. Utopia, whether a concept, an idea, a semblance or a reality can be regarded as such: the exotic can be treated as an utopian subject precisely due to the lack of reciprocity between analyst and subject. In this sense Utopia of Exotic, an inquiry into what the two terms mean nowadays, explores economic, social and political aspects of what Western society considers exotic land or culture, trying to underline the utopian character of the term exotic. (Excerpt from the text “Utopia of Exotic” by Andrei Craciun, from the publication with the same title).
Saturday October 23rd 2010, 2:20 am
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On November 16 2010 PAVILION UNICREDIT reopened after the summer break with Rien ne va Plus, an exhibition produced by Powerhouse Company, a dutch architecture office.
The impact of the financial crash on architecture was unforeseen and unprecedented. The question, “what’s wrong with our financial system?”, could be followed by the question, “what’s wrong with our architecture?”
This last boom was caused by the financial structures of real estate loans and speculation. Architecture became a means of wealth rather than well-being, a speculation feeder and a marketeer. From the socially committed origins of modernism, to postmodernism, to fashion and icon architecture – what is left of the moral authority that the Modern Movement had given to architecture? And if architecture is no longer socially committed, how can it provide for much-needed sustainable solutions? How can we create architecture that is based on long-term qualities rather than on short-term profits?
Rien ne va Plus started as a research project based on the assumption that we are today witnessing three crises. First, an economic crisis caused by excessive speculation on housing, secondly, an environmental crisis giving rise to unprecedented climate changes and thirdly, a generational crisis caused by the retirement of the biggest generation ever.
The exhibition is not a conclusion on how to make a better practice, neither does it offer immediate solutions; it aims to open a conversation, firstly, about the necessary shift in our overall mindset and then about possible answers to these crises.
Saturday September 25th 2010, 11:55 pm
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September 21, 2010 - Anne Barlow, the appointed curator of BB5, held a press conference in New York
Anne Barlow, the Curator of BUCHAREST BIENNALE 5, held a press conference on the 21st of September 2010, at Art in General (79 Walker Street), New York, USA, at 6.00 PM. At the press conference participated the co-directors of BB, Razvan Ion & Eugen Radescu, and the assistant curator Simina Neagu.
Monday September 13th 2010, 4:38 am
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The Reality of Contemporary Art Biennials at Romanian Cultural Institute StockholmIn connection with the exhibition The Realism Question – Epilogue to Bucharest Biennale 4 on 6 September at 6.30 pm
Participants: Răzvan Ion (far right), Johan Pousette (middle left) and Eugen Rădescu (middle right).
Moderator: Charlotte Bydler (on left)
Wednesday July 28th 2010, 8:59 pm
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BUCHAREST BIENNALE 4. Handlung. On Producing Possibilities.
curated by Felix Vogel
May 21 - July 25
Venues: PAVILION UNICREDIT, Institute for Political Research, Paradis Garaj, Center for Visual Introspection, Geology Museum
Is there a difference between actions and stories? The German term Handlung serves not so much as a translation for both words, but much sooner it refers to the very semantic level. It is impossible to differentiate ‘actions’ from ’stories’, both meanings are intrinsically linked to each other and generate each other. It is exactly this ambiguity of Handlung that should be stressed here and be made productive. The 4th Bucharest Biennale suggests an experimental set-up to scrutinize different modes of action, possible courses and capabilities of action. It will try to examine various stories, interweaved plots, and fictions and how all this is bound to or detached from concepts of agency. How is agency proposed and what instructions for taking action are necessary or have to be developed? We will examine practices that criticize, rewrite, correct or queer established narratives as well as yet other forms that play with the set of conditions of constructing narrations and history. It will be about the appearing of things in the blinding bright light that shines out of the public realm. With this project, we will investigate how, who, and where these possibilities of action are produced, how one can intervene in common patterns and how other and new possibilities of Handlung can be generated. In a critical manner, the set-up of this project will be based on the urban and spatial organization of Bucharest with its different historical and political layers and thus trying to examine how urban structures and architecture act as agents to allow, interdict and produce Handlungen.
from left to right installation of: Claudia Cristovao, Andrea Geyer, Asa Sonjasdotter
from left to right installation of: Claudia Cristovao, Asa Sonjasdotter
from left to right installation of: Andrea Geyer, Emily Roysdon
from left to right installation of: Cabello/Carceller, Ion Grigorescu
from left to right installation of: Lan Tuazon, Charlotte Ginsborg
installation of Kalle Brolin
from left to right installation of: Nicoline van Harskam, Fereshteh Toosi, Ștefan Constantinescu, Alexander Kluge
installation of Lina Selander
from left to right installation of: Maryam Jafri, Mona Vatamanu & Florin Tudor, Martin Beck
from left to right installation of: Christine Meisner, Sabrina Gschwandtner
from left to right installation of: Goldin+Senneby, Asier Mendizabal
Wednesday July 28th 2010, 8:59 pm
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On 20th of May BUCHAREST BEINNALE 4 opened for the preview.
The day started with a press conference held by Razvan Ion and Eugen Radescu, co-directors of BB, Felix Vogel, curator of BB4, Renaud Thiers representing Pilsner Urquell and Anca Nuta representing UniCredit. The press conference was attended by more then 300 Romanian and international journalists and professionals.
Wednesday July 28th 2010, 8:59 pm
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After three weeks of almost nonstop working, struggling with old electrical installations, dirty-old-falling-apart walls, huge queues in bricolage shops, traffic jams, heat, rain and demonstrations in front of the Government Palace, the team of BB4 finally managed to install the exhibition!!!
Few days before the opening, curator Felix Vogel organized a special guided tour of the exhibition for the volunteers of BB4.
Wednesday July 28th 2010, 8:58 pm
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On May 21, in the lecture hall of the National University of Arts, Felix Vogel moderated a talk aiming to explore the production of the concept and the responses of the artists.
Wednesday July 28th 2010, 8:58 pm
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From 20th of May to 30th of May, 13 students from the installation department and work.master, contemporary art practices, Haute ecole d’art et de design, HEAD Geneve, Switzerland, will join Bucharest and work on site specific interventions around the housing area of Rahova-Uranus. The idea is to produce singular views on what the term of „Handlung“, as Felix Vogel makes it accessible for his concept on the public sphere in Bucharest, can mean in terms of an ephemeral art production. Trop tot, trop tard | Too early, too late. Activating the present, now. is also asking about the conflict of being elsewhere than in the right place at the right time, of missed opportunities, and a possible change.
Participants: Sonia Kacem, Stephan Freivogel, Hadrien Rossier, Olga Kokcharova, Roxana Sima, Violetta Perra, Stéphanie Giorgis, Emeline Vitte, Ceel Mogami de Haas, Laurent Peter, Vincent de Roguin, Natalia Comandari, Florent Meng
The 13 different approaches – between installation, performance, writing, sound- and video art, as well as a conference – were presented to the public on May, 29th with a conference and a guided tour.
A project by:
Katharina Hohmann, professor at the Installation, Sculpture and Space department, accompanied by Laurent Schmid, professor at the work.master programme, both HEAD Genève in collaboration with Felix Vogel.
Wednesday July 28th 2010, 8:58 pm
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On 25th and 26th of June, in cooperation with the Swiss Institute for Art Research in Zurich (SIK-ISEA), Bucharest Biennale hosted an international conference on the “Biennale Principle”. The agenda addressed the genealogical aspects of Art Biennales by discussing the history of the Venice Biennale, as well as the present and future conditions of Art Biennales such as the Bucharest Biennale. The conference was based on the assumption that Art Biennales are foremostly Janus-faced. On one hand, they are part of the globalized art market and perpetuate its structures, rites and conventions - the homogenizing effect of Biennales. On the other hand, they often highlight local, regional or national idiosyncrasies - the heterogenizing effect of Biennales.
Speakers: Jorg Scheller, Felix Vogel, Beat Wyss, Zdenka Badovinac, Jan May, Ursula Zeller, Annika Hossain, Susann Oehler, Razvan Ion, Marcus Graf, Li Zhenhua, Natasha Becker.
Saturday March 27th 2010, 6:59 am
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On 25th of March, PAVILION UNICREDIT hosted the 19th lecture from ZEPPELIN series produced by Arhitectura magazine: SITUATIONIST URBANISM, a presentation by Wilfried Hackenbroich.
Wilfried Hackenbroich worked in some famous architecture offices, such as OMA (Rotterdam) or Morphosis (Los Angeles). His activity during the last years has an deliberately multidisciplinary character, from research applied to the project in the works of the Hackenbroich Architekten office to a considerable number of contests, to teaching in advanced studies schools (such as Bauhaus Dessau) or the research projects and the publications in the field of urbanism.
Saturday March 27th 2010, 6:51 am
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The second series of FREE ACADEMY classes just ended. For this session we invited Andreea Grecu (cultural manager) and Corneliu Porumboiu (film director).
Andreea Grecu: CULTURAL NETWORKS - COOPERATION AS AN ORGANIZATIONAL DEVELOPMENT ALTERNATIVE
Corneliu Porumboiu: THE WANDERING ROMANIAN - the presentation and screening of Les amoureux de Dieu and Cabal In Kabul, two documentary films directed by Dan Alexe, followed by a dialogue between Corneliu Porumboiu and Dan Alexe.
On 11th of March 2010, PAVILION UNICREDIT hosted Translating Time: Losses and Gains, an artist talk with Ioana Nemes, one of the participating artists of Comrades of Time.
Ioana Nemes (b.1979) is one of the most acknowledged and exhibited Romanian artists of her generation. She participated, among other shows, in Istanbul Biennial, (2009), U-Turn Copenhagen (2008), Prague Biennial (2007) and Bucharest Biennial (2006). Recently she showed Relics for the Afterfuture (Brown) – a series of sculptures scrutinizing lost Romanian traditional rituals - at Jiri Svestka Berlin. She lives and works in Bucharest.
Tuesday March 02nd 2010, 7:52 am
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On 25th of February PAVILION UNICREDIT hosted Films on Art and Activism an artist talk by Martin Krenn.
Born in 1970, in Vienna, Martin Krenn attends the University of Applied Arts and the Conservatory. He is particularly interested in art in public space and multimedia art, his work focusing on questions regarding the civil society and its confrontation with recent history. Krenn also teaches at the University of Art in Vienna.
Tuesday February 23rd 2010, 6:09 am
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On 18th of February 2010 PAVILION UNICREDIT opened Comrades of Time, an exhibition curated by Joanna Sokolowska.
Participants: Zbynek Baladran (CZ), Grigor Khachatryan (AM), Anna Molska (PL), Ioana Nemes (RO), Skart (SRB), Clemens von Wedemeyer (DE)
“To be con-temporary (…) means to be “with time” rather than “in time.” “Con-temporary” in German is “zeitgenössisch.” As Genosse means “comrade,” to be con-temporary—zeitgenössisch—can thus be understood as being a “comrade of time”—as collaborating with time, helping time when it has problems, when it has difficulties.” (Boris Groys)
starting from left, Razvan Ion,
Joanna Sokolowska, Eugen Radescu
Why do contemporary artists become such active “comrades of time” intervening in the ways in which time is framed by the historical meta-narratives implicit in contemporary social spaces? The exhibition relates this question to artistic practices that confront dilemmas posed by the representation, remembrance and actualisation of the past as far as it concerns projects of socialist and communist modernity. In the artists’ works, two principal interconnected modes of thought can be detected: on the one hand, a reflection on the possible meanings of the layers of history present in architecture and other forms of the organisation of life, in particular questioning the way history is mediated and medialised. Thus, the focus here is on the contemporary conditions of the production of the experience of the past. On the other hand, a strong emphasis is also placed on thinking about the emancipatory aspect of modernity as an unfinished project. From this perspective, the urgent need is to assess modernity’s present-day potential and at the same time critically examine its mistakes.
Modernist ideological projects can be seen with especial intensity in the construction process, in acts of destruction and rebuilding that are inexorably linked with the writing of history and a policing of memory. “Narrative and construction,” notes Ricoeur, “bring about a similar kind of inscription, the one in the endurance of time, the other in the enduringness of materials. Each new building is inscribed in urban space like a narrative within a setting of intertextuality”. Destruction can erase or suspend old histories in time, and thus announce the inception of new narratives. The process of the production and reproduction of the social space in which the evolving urban fabric, architecture and design function forms an interesting challenge for artists, in as much as they interpret it as a palimpsest composed not just of spectacular, visible and physical temporo-spatial layers, but also of multiple invisible and immaterial strata piled on top of one another. Artists are not so much concerned with the uncovering and presentation of an erased text that may once have existed, but encode or reactivate it, exposing the current context in which it might emerge. It is here that artists are active comrades of time, mixing frames recognized from descriptions of history and inventing new trajectories for past events. Interested in the complex nature of the desire to grasp the past, they perform transformations on the senses ascribed to it, making use, for example, of the method of repetition or remakes. Repetition is in fact an actualization of the conditions of production that emerge from a reworking of the past.
The exploration of the traces of a lost utopia in contemporary social space that is present in the works of Clemens von Wedemeyer (“Silberhöhe”, “Die Siedlung”) , Zbyněk Baladrán (“Glossary”, “Socio-fiction II”) and Grigor Khachatryan (“Churches”) is connected with a question as to the mediation of the imagining and remembering of them through the different images and various technologies operative in the field of visual culture: fiction and documentary films, video and television. Probing images through different modes of their “technical reproducibility” they get to the very heart of the contemporary immaterial and affective aspect of an economy that generates first and foremost mediated images and desires.
The question of the contemporary emancipatory potential of revolutionary ideas, of socialism and communism, and the role of art in the transformation of society are taken up in the works of Škart (“Our Miracle”) Anna Molska (“W=F*S (Work)”, “P=W:t (Power)”) and Zbyněk Baladrán. What conditions produce the need to even ask such questions today? The artists` suggestions can be seen within the discussions of the problem of the erasing of communism from the history of the societies that experienced it, or the simple treating of it as a mistake, a temporary break in the universal striving towards capitalism. This amnesia and the lack of new political horizons was one of the factors supposed to facilitate the domination of the current paradigm in which antagonisms are subdued. The strength of negated sentiments can lead to the fantasy of reconstructing lost, a-historical, stable and “true” traditions in the sense described by Svetlana Boym as “restorative nostalgia” and to an explosive “return of the repressed.” The artists propose a working through of the past through returning to it and testing its elements today.
Their work on modes of recalling, forgetting or reactivating the former ideas of socialist modernity, elements of which still contribute to the production of the spaces in which we live, enables a reassessment of the contemporary potential of art in relation to the new economy, to forms of organisation of life and to the initiation of collective experiences. (Extras from the publication “Comrades of Time”)
Tuesday February 02nd 2010, 3:12 am
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On January 28, PAVILION UNICREDIT hosted The Fiction of the Contemporary: Speculative Collectivity and the Global Transnational, a lecture by Peter Osborne.
Peter Osborne is Professor of Modern European Philosophy and Director of the Centre for Research in Modern European Philosophy, Middlesex University, London and an editor of the journal Radical Philosophy. His books include The Politics of Time: Modernity and Avant-Garde (Verso, 1995), Philosophy in Cultural Theory (Routledge, 2000), Conceptual Art (Phaidon, 2002), Marx (Granta, 2005) and (ed.) Walter Benjamin: Critical Evaluations in Cultural Theory (3 Volumes, Routledge, 2005). His writing on contemporary art includes contributions to Afterall, Art History, October, Oxford Art Journal, and catalogues for Manifesta 5 (San Sebastian, 2004), Time Zones (Tate Modern, 2004), Zones of Contact (2006 Biennale of Sydney), The Quick and the Dead (Walker Art Center, Minneapolis, 2009) and Matias Faldbakken: The Shock of Abstraction (National Museum of Art, Architecture and Design, Oslo/Ikon, Birmingham 2009). A Spanish edition of his recent essays, El arte más allá de la estética: Ensayos filosóficos sobre el arte contemporáneo, is forthcoming from CENDEAC, Murcia, January 2010.
Friday January 22nd 2010, 4:41 am
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On January 21, 2010, PAVILION UNICREDIT hosted AUSTRIA AS AN EXAMPLE OF HOW ARTS BECAME A TOPIC OF PUBLIC INTEREST EXAMINED OVER A PERIOD OF ABOUT 60 YEARS., a lecture by Karin Cervenka.
Karin Cervenka, 1969, Vienna, graduated in philology at the University of Vienna, specialized in modern literature and translation science, translator of French and Spanish contemporary literature, since 1991 working for the Ministry of European and International Affairs of the Republic of Austria, since 1997 dedicates herself entirely to art management, from 2003 to 2008 director of the Austrian Cultural Forum in Madrid, since 2008 director of the Austrian Cultural Forum in Bucharest. The Austrian Cultural Forum in Bucharest depends on the foreign ministry. It focuses on art networking in Middle and Southeast Europe.
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Wednesday December 23rd 2009, 10:56 am
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Wednesday December 23rd 2009, 10:53 am Edit This
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100 ROMANIAN MINUTES
Curator: Andrei Craciun
Artists: Stefan Constantinescu, Teodor Graur, Ion Grigorescu, Ciprian Homorodean, Sebastian Moldovan, Corneliu Porumboiu
Romania, the complex of European Romanians and the pride of Romanian Europeans, continues to place itself in the East, incapable of escaping the East-West hierarchy, curse of the Balkans- a linguistic invention adopted much too easily. The way of relating to the local, national, European, global reference points suggests the way we relate to our own nationality, excited by an unconscious nationalism, flat and auto-destructive or tired of our own history and willing to deny it, paralyzed by the incapability of action.
Romanians assume the status of ideological victim of circumstances, reliving the traumas of communism, under the shelter of capitalism. It seems that democracy was too expensive for us to afford the luxury of delving into it; instead we afford the liberty of not getting involved, the liberty of not contributing, and the liberty of not choosing. We establish parties and we suppress the civil society. We dispose of responsibility and we invoke the right to suffer.
Self-criticism and auto-irony are the instruments of the Romanian artist, the result being the self-criticism and auto-irony of society. The artist underlines, draws attention and makes room for inquiries. We become immigrants. Their immigrants, of those that we wanted to be. Romanians seem to want to be themselves, a sort of artificial transposition into something that we don’t understand. The immigrant is the one that suffers. We go everywhere and it seems that everything slips away. We live suspended in an absurd temporality, but on a safe ground.
The contemporary Romanian artist seems touched by the melancholy and fatalism of trying to justify the past through the analysis of rethinking it, trying to question its authenticity, authority and validity. No matter if these artists are actors in famous movies, immigrants in the battle with the “other”, hidden participants in the destruction of a status quo, no matter if they mock reality or get involved in the emotion of the present, they all want to contribute to the new history.
Andrei Craciun (b. 1988) is a curator and theoretician, studying architecture at University of Architecture and Urbanism “Ion Mincu”, Bucharest. His research and curatorial practice is focused on the relations between architecture, politics and the social sphere. Consequently, he is interested in areas linked to activism, gender, as well as participative architecture. Currently he is working on his new curatorial projects “Utopia of Exotic” and “Destroying Public Harmony”. Since 2008 he is the coordinator of PAVILION UNICREDIT - center for contemporary art & culture and he was appointed as assistant curator for BUCHAREST BIENNALE 2010. Living and working in Bucharest. (Extras from 100 Romanian Minutes publication).
Image: Ciprian Homorodean, 9’00’’, videostill from “I am Luke Skywalker”, 2006. Courtesy of the artist.
100 SWEDISH MINUTES
Curator: Catrin Lundqvist
Artists: Magnus Bartas, Loulou Cherinet, Mats Hjelm, Jesper Nordahl, Marika Orenius, Lina Selander,
Alexander Vaindorf
From the middle of 20th century, Sweden had rapid industrial growth which has contributed to a stable economy. The country adopted the Swedish model that turned Sweden into social, cultural and economical well fare state. This was also the period when immigration increased in Sweden due to the need of labor in Swedish industries.
Sweden did not experience any war for many centuries. Generally Swedish people do not like disputing too much, in stead they prefer coming to consensus based on discussion. People rarely talk about
their political ideologies.
These general ideas about the Swedish political landscape, together with the lack of conflicts and political unrest might make politics, a less frequent subject to Swedish artists. In Sweden today you might find more artists working on how political engagement affects personal life on a psychological level rather than working on political standpoints or artists may find interest in working with political or sociological phenomena abroad.
Catrin Lundqvist is a curator of the Moderna Museet in Stockholm and a free-lance curator with her own company Domestic Art. At the Moderna Museet, she is currently working with film, video, and performance-based art, and organising debates and seminars on contemporary art.
From left to right: prof. Bogdan Iacob, theoretician Razvan Ion, curator Andrei Craciun, theoretician Eugen Radescu and prof. Mara Ratiu in the panel discussion.
Curator Andrei Craciun presenting the “100 Romanian Minutes” project.
WAKEFIELD MEADOWS is an artificial living environment that was generated by the real life experiences of the curator and of the artists, created inside the space of Pavilion UniCredit. WAKEFIELD MEADOWS explores the inside of some of today’s oversaturated and artificial living systems and social conventions, caught in an obsessive historical turbine and unable to move forward, every-day life cliches, the middle class capitalist family and the social underground, the consumerist super-structures, the trajectory of classified information and the invasive art market.
One of the starting points of the curatorial debate was the case of Wakefield, the ‘universal character’ from Nathaniel Hawthorne’s short story with the same title. One day, Wakefield left his house and his wife and then returned after 20 years as if nothing had happened, carrying on with his normal existence. The moral of the story: ‘Amid the seeming confusion of our mysterious world, individuals are so nicely adjusted to a system, and systems to one another, and to a whole, that, by stepping aside for a moment, a man exposes himself to a fearful risk of losing his place forever.’ (excerpt from ‘Wakefield’ by Nathaniel Hawthorne)
The artists featured in the exhibition appropriated the human condition of Wakefield, the misplaced individual, after his return, in the 20th year and infiltrated in apparent sealed environments, becoming insiders, questioning their identity and their place.
from left to rigt, Eugen Radescu, Adrien Tirtiaux, Diane Pernet, Anca Mihulet, Razvan Ion
Wednesday December 02nd 2009, 5:52 am
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On November 26 PAVILION UNICREDIT hosted 100 SWEDISH MINUTES, a screening project curated by Catrin Lundqvist and initiated by Razvan Ion and Eugen Radescu, followed by a Q&A session with the curator.
Catrin Lundqvist
Artists: Magnus Bartas, Loulou Cherinet, Mats Hjelm, Jesper Nordahl, Marika Orenius, Lina Selander and Alexander Vaindorf.
Tuesday November 24th 2009, 1:40 am
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On November 21 PAVILION UNICREDIT hosted ECONOMY OF EFFORT, a screening project curated by Ioana Nitu and Silvia Vasilescu, followed by a Q&A with the curators.
Participants: Valerie Soe, Gabriel de la Mora, Diane Nerwen, Les Leveque, Mumia Abu-Jamal (Prison Radio)
Saturday November 14th 2009, 6:42 am
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On November 13 PAVILION UNICREDIT hosted the screening of ANONYMOUS NOMAD, a video of the artists Trygve Luktvasslimo and Ditte Lyngkær Pedersen, followed by a session of Q&A with the artists.
Monday November 02nd 2009, 4:03 am
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On October 29 PAVILION UNICREDIT hosted the screening of 100 Romanian Minutes, a project curated by Andrei Craciun and initiated by Razvan Ion and Eugen Radescu and also the Launching of issue 13 of PAVILION journal for politics and culture, with the topic Medicine Sociale.
Monday October 26th 2009, 11:23 pm
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On October 22, PAVILION UNICREDIT hosted, in the frame of “EXPLORING THE RETURN OF REPRESSION”, a lecture by Urban Larssen, social anthropologist, under the title “CASA SCANTEII: CONTROLLED MEDIA FACTORY”
Friday October 16th 2009, 5:36 am
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On October 15, PAVILION UNICREDIT hosted, under the title CABINET OF CURIOSITIES, a lecture by Sina Najafi, editor-in-chief of CABINET magazine, New York.
Monday October 12th 2009, 2:24 am
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On October 7, PAVILION UNICREDIT hosted in the frame of EXPLORING THE RETURN OF REPRESSION, a dialogue between Razvan Ion (curator of the exhibition and director of PAVILION UNICREDIT) and Sebastian Moldovan (artist, participant in the exhibition), under the title “A Red Tomato Always Needs a Walking Stick”.
Saturday September 26th 2009, 6:56 am
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On September 10 PAVILION UNICREDIT opened EXPLORING THE RETURN OF REPRESSION, an exhibition curated by Razvan Ion.
The return of the repressed is a crucial theme, a key to understanding recent history. “The project of the West, the Nietzschean project, has been to drive out religion and to produce a secular society in which men and women make their own values because morality is gone. Then suddenly radical religion returns from the Third World. How can you not laugh at that? How can you not find that a deep historical irony?” (Hanif Kureishi, in International Herald Tribune).
According to Freud, the very act of entering into civilized society entails the repression of various archaic, primitive desires. For Freud repression is a normal part of human development; indeed, the analysis of dreams, literature, jokes, and “Freudian slips” illustrates the ways that our secret desires continue to find outlet in perfectly well-adjusted individuals. However, when we are faced with obstacles to satisfaction of our libido’s cathexis, when we experience traumatic events, or when we remain fixated on earlier phases of our development, the conflict between the libido and the ego (or between the ego and the superego) can lead to alternative sexual discharges.
The return of the repressed is the process whereby repressed elements, preserved in the unconscious, tend to reappear, in consciousness or in behavior, in the shape of secondary and more or less unrecognizable “derivatives of the unconscious.” This return of the repressed, of ideologies forced to marginalization, of sexuality subject to forced secrecy, has resulted, in recent years, in an almost dramatic change of a society filled with anguish, hallucinations, repression imposed by unnecessary regulations that serve to the repressive violence of governments against their own citizens. (Excerpt from the text “Exploring the return of repression” by Razvan Ion).
Participants: Luke Fowler (GB), Jean Genet (FR), Hanif Kureishi (GB), Thomas Hirschhorn (CH), Renzo Martens (NL/CG), Alex Mirutziu (RO), Naeem Mohaiemen (BD), Sebastian Moldovan (RO), Taller Popular De Serigrafia (AR), Colm Toibin (IE), Michel Tournier (FR), Pavilion Resource Room (RO)
The exhibition will be open for public until November 22, 2009.
Saturday September 26th 2009, 4:27 am
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Thursday, 17th September, 2009, PAVILION UNICREDIT hosted a preview lecture of FREE ACADEMY, held by Anca Mihulet, with the topic: Curatorship in Times of Trouble.
Monday September 21st 2009, 7:52 am
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Friday, 11th September, 2009, PAVILION UNICREDIT hosted a preview lecture of FREE ACADEMY, held by ADRIAN MAJURU, with the topic: AD AND COMMERCE: BUSINESS AND BEHAVIOR.
Thursday July 30th 2009, 3:32 am
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On 14th of July Filippo Maggia, Chief Curator of the Photographic Collection of Fondazione Cassa di Risparmio di Modena, and Andrea Cossu visited PAVILION.
Wednesday July 01st 2009, 11:10 pm
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The lecture ‘Curator in progress. About a practice in permanent evolution’ held by Enrico Lunghi was the introduction to the international curatorial symposium which is taking place in Plovdiv at the end of October. The project is co-organised by the New Bulgarian University Sofia and the Centre for Contemporary Art ‘Banja Starinna’, Plovdiv with the kind support of the European Cultural Foundation and the Sachsen-Anhalt Meeting-point Centre. Partners of the project are Goethe-Institut Sofia, Pavilion Unicredit, Bucharest and Feinkost Gallery, Berlin.
Image from the lecture
Yana Kostova (right), curator and in the middle Enrico Lunghi.
In the night between 12th and 13th of June, PAVILION UNICREDIT participated in the White Night of the Galleries program.
Open air hopscotch: Public Space Captive With No Cause
The best player was rewarded with a batch of books extracted from our PAVILION RESOURCE ROOM + the latest album of vaduvaBOB.
All participants got PAVILION - journal for politics and culture - no. 13 “MEDECINE SOCIALE” (just released that day).
Special treat concert: our favourite psychosexual dirge punk band vaduvaBOB.
Wednesday May 27th 2009, 5:45 am
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In May 23 the Director of Art in General, together with a group of curators visited PAVILION UNICREDIT.
From left to right, MARIANNA DOBKWSKA (curator at Canter for Contemporary Art Ujazdowski Castle) , NINA HORISAKI-CHRISTENS (Assistant Curator at Art in General, BRANKO FRANCESCHI (curator), ANNE BARLOW (Director of Art in General NY)
On April 30, PAVILION UNICREDIT hosted the opening of HOW INNOCENT IS THAT?, an exhibition curated by Eugen Radescu, opened for the public until July 05.
Participants: AES+F (Rusia), Carlos Aires (Spain), Juan delGado (Spain/UK), Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (Germany).
Andrei Craciun (left), coordinator of PAVILION UNICREDIT, Razvan Ion (centre), Director of PAVILION UNICREDIT and Eugen Radescu (right), curator of the show.
“In our times, who can pay much attention to the massacre of the innocence? The innocents of yesterday are sending the bombs of today, these supreme gifts of helplessness, infamy and failure. There is an East of the innocence, like there is a West of the innocents. As I am living in Romania - the state and paideuma of innocence in its unbalanced, unhappy and dumb form - I imagined the “stranger”, with his “strangeness”, was something - something else (together with his alter). Far from the truth. We are all false, disintegrated, miserable, and lacking innocence. Lacking interest. Civilization doesn’t mean the steam engine, but it means civility, the ability to have civic relationships, to follow judicial norms. Somehow, all these attributes are lost. We have forgotten our civility; we lost our civilization. We have become innocent vacuum cleaners and we are sucking in ignorance, pain, ardour, hatred, show. Nowadays it is easier to kill one thousand people than say “Have a good day”. (quoted from Eugen Radescu’s book “HOW INNOCENT IS THAT?)
Saturday March 21st 2009, 8:20 am
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Every week PAVILION UNICREDIT hosts informal meeting of students, artists, curators, cultural managers. The topics are chosen from the books/publications of PAVILION RESOURSE ROOM.
Monday February 23rd 2009, 2:17 am
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After 3 years of hard work we have completed our tools with PAVILION UNICREDIT - center for contemporary art. After the magazine and Bucharest Biennale, with PAVILION UNICREDIT we are completed.
At the opening there were more than 50 journalists who represented newspapers, tv channels, radios and magazines from around the world. At the opening night on 19th of February 2009 the space seemed too tight and small. All 450 sqm were occupied. More than 350 people attended and we are sorry we did not expect that. Some people had to wait in front to enter the center.
More about the program here: www.pavilionunicredit.ro
And some images (photo Ioana Nitu).
At the press conference, part of the team (from left to right): Lia Perjovschi, Eugen Radescu, Andrei Craciun, Ioana Roescu, Razvan Ion.
Silvia Vasilescu, our education & publications manager, acting as a tv reporter.
The journalists.
Lia Perjovschi made a tour of the exhibition with all journalists.
Felix Vogel, curator of Bucharest Biennale 4 and Ion Grigorescu, one of the legendary Romanian artists.
The space was too small for so many people that wanted to be at the opening.
Part of the team (from left to right): Andrei craciun, eugen radescu, Razvan Ion, Alex enachioaie, Anca Nuta, Ioana Roescu.
Debate after the opening. Only the team. Facing the camera first on the left, our assistant director Ioana Nitu.
Sunday February 08th 2009, 12:45 am
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After months of hard work and unexpected problems PAVILION UNICREDIT - center for contemporary art & culture - will be opened on the 19th of February 19.00 hours. Please visit www.pavilionunicredit.ro for more details.
Tuesday January 13th 2009, 10:12 pm
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The underconstruction space.
The much anticipated PAVILION UNICREDIT - center for contemporary art & culture is underconstruction. It will have 270 sqm of exhibition space and 140 sqm of offices and facilities (including the CAA/CAA wonderful archive of books and publications put together by Lia & Dan Perjovschi and PAVILION RESOURCE ROOM put together by Razvan Ion and Eugen Radescu).
The author of the project design is the fabulous architect Adriana Mereuta.
Expected opening: February 19, 2009 — 19.00 hours.
Our under-construction web address: www.pavilionunicredit.ro
Galeria Posibila is pleased to announce the first Bucharest retrospective of the internationally acclaimed Romanian artist Dan Perjovschi. His 20-year practice which has revolutionized drawing is seen through the printed materials it has resulted in, from artist books or self-published newspapers to the complete collection of 22 opposition magazine, in which he has contributed ever since 1990.
A new artist book has been published on the occasion of the exhibition, comprising three of Perjovschi’s projects in 2008. As always, the book mirrors the preparatory note-books of each project, the printed material functioning as an archive of an otherwise ephemeral practice. His witty, politically charged comments on the cities of Bucharest, Brussels and Chisinau are intertwined in this pocket-size catalogue, of which a special edition of 20 includes an original drawing.
Image: Pavilion postcards and the magazine in Dan Perjovschi’s exhibition. Photo: Ioana Nitu.
Monday December 01st 2008, 11:03 pm
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5. MSE � Meeting (Middle-South-East Meeting) �Network Practice�
Faculty of Art and Design at Jan Evangelista Purkyne University in Usti nad Labem
Pasteurova 9, 400 01 Usti nad Labem, Czech Republic
28/29 November 2008
The idea of the MSE � Meetings (MSE stands for Middle-South-East Europe) is to gather leaders of art initatives & institutions, curators and
theoreticians with a focus on the Middle-South-Eastern European region in order to exchange knowledge, information and experiences and
to discuss the specific topic of the Meeting. The Meetings are held biannual and always in different countries.
This edition of MSE � Meeting will put its focus on the idea of networking itself. Therefore a number of representatives from other
comparable networks and leaders of institutions respectively curators who work with network related ideas and structures will be invited
to join the Meeting in order to compare and discuss the different conceptions of existing networks and the role they can play in further
developing of international collaborative projects among participants of such networks. Questions of different impact of a specific project idea
on particular art scenes will be as well raised as challenges of collaboration in the moment of different basic conceptions of participating art
initiatives and further on disproportions in the MSE region regarding the ability to get projects funded.
FRIDAY, 28/11/2008
A) SWAPING ENERGY IN AND OUT
About institutions and activities which on the one hand bring international input into their local contexts, into their institutions and programmes
and, on the other, and the other way around, try to foster local activities and transport them abroad. Creativity is needed in developing new
models of collaboration especially when the institutions do not have much support on a local administrative level or first have to become
established on the international art map.
10:00 �10:30 Keynote speech: Iara Boubnova / ICA � Institute of Contemporary Art (Sofia)
10:30 �10:50 Rael Artel / Public Preparation (Tallinn)
10:50 �11:10 Els Hanappe / ITYS � Institute for Contemporary Art and Thought (Athens)
11:10 �11:30 Vlad Morariu / Vector Cultural Association (Iasi)
11:30 �11:50 Helen Hirsch / Kunstmuseum Thun (Thun)
11:50 �12:20 Discussion
Moderators: Michal Kolecek & Zdena Koleckova / FAD UJEP � Faculty of Art and Design
at Jan Evangelista Purkyne University in Usti nad Labem (Usti nad Labem)
13:00 �15:00 Lunch break
B) LINKING DIFFERENT FIELDS: ART, ACTIVISM & SCIENCE
About the development of networks beyond the borders of art and the role of art spaces in multidisciplinary discourses. To which spheres can
art be connected? The connections to the fields of political activism and social science are of special interest. Are there possible synergies
and possibilities to widen the audience? What about the interest and response from activists, scientists and NGOs? Can art have an influence
on political and social discourses?
15:00 �15:30 Keynote speech: Razvan Ion / Bucharest Biennale, Pavilion magazine (Bucharest)
15:30 �15:50 Antonia Majaca, Ivana Bago / Miroslav Kraljevic Gallery (Zagreb)
15:50 �16:10 Martin Krenn / IG Bildende Kunst (Vienna)
16:10 �16:30 Lise Skou, Ditte Lyngkaer / rum46 (Aarhus)
16:30 �17:00 Discussion
Moderator: Luchezar Boyadjiev / ICA � Institute of Contemporary Art (Sofia)
SATURDAY, 29/11/2008
C) NETWORKING CULTURE
About the importance of networks in the daily practice. How networks are conceived, how they are growing and how they are established.
About the differences between networks conceived for longer duration and such for temporary, project-based use. What about the networks
initiated by established institutions and such emerging from small initiatives? Does networking help to catch the public�s eye, which is hard to
catch without? How can the further development of networks be managed?
10:00 �10:30 Keynote speech: Peter M�rtenb�ck, Helge Moshammer / Networked Cultures (London / Vienna)
10:30 �10:50 Ana Dzokic, Marc Neelen / STEALTH.unlimited (Rotterdam)
10:50 �11:10 Antje Weitzel, Dortje Drechsel / uqbar (Berlin)
11:10 �11:30 Vit Havranek, Zbynek Baladran / Tranzitdisplay (Prague)
11:30 �11:50 Elena Tsvetaeva / NCCA � National Centre for Contemporary Arts (Kaliningrad)
11:50 �12:20 Discussion
Moderator: Alenka Gregoric / Skuc Gallery (Ljubljana)
13:00 �15:00 Lunch break
D) LOCAL CONNECTING / NEIGHBOURHOODS
About the importance of networks in a regional context. What is in focus in the work of institutions which actively play their role in
a geographical region, within a country or cross border connecting institutions in neighbouring countries. Can such activities gain importance
on an international level? On which requirements is the desire for local networking based?
15:00 �15:30 Keynote speech: Basak Senova / NOMAD (Istanbul)
15:30 �15:50 Ivana Marjanovic, Vida Knezevic / Kontekst Gallery (Belgrade)
15:50 �16:10 Stefan Rusu / [ksa:k] Center for Contemporary Art (Chisinau)
16:10 �16:30 Monika Szewczyk / Arsenal Gallery (Bialystok)
16:30 �16:50 Yane Calovski / press to exit project space (Skopje)
16:50 �17:20 Discussion
Moderators: Margarethe Makovec & Anton Lederer / < rotor > association for contemporary art (Graz)
SPECIAL GUESTS:
Filip Radunovic, Christiane Erharter / ERSTE Foundation (Vienna)
Nino Tchogoshvili / Art Academy Tbilissi (Tbilissi)
Monday December 01st 2008, 10:58 pm
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Bucharest Biennale participated in “All Biennials of the World Today” organized by The Funda��o Bienal de S�o Paulo and the curators of the 28th Bienalle.
A large library installed on the pavilion’s third floor, consisting of an archive, an auditorium, a meeting room, a reading room, a computer hall with internet access, and a collection of 600 publications from 72 countries. The library is based on the collections of the Archive Wanda Svevo of the S�o Paulo Biennial’s Foundation, and will frame and support the cycle of conferences to take place between October and November 2008.
Image: PAVILION reader of Bucharest Biennale 3 exhibited. Courtesy of S�o Paulo Biennial.
Monday December 01st 2008, 10:53 pm
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APEX ART NEW YORK
Thursday, November 13, 6:30 pm
How innocent is that? Eugen Radescu and Bosko Blagojevic in conversation about the state of innocence in Eastern Europe.
Eugen Radescu is an independent curator, co-founder, and co-publisher at Pavilion magazine, chairman of artphoto asc., and co-director of Bucharest Biennale. Eugen Radescu is in residence with apexart as the recipient of a CEC ArtsLink Fellowship.
Bosko Blagojevic is an artist and writer based in Brooklyn. His writing on art and culture has appeared in a variety of media both online and off, including recently the journals Afterimage, USELESS and Art Asia Pacific, as well as several artist’s publications. He, along with Xenia Pachikov, is co-founder and director of Platform for Pedagogy, a New York-based organization working to advance a culture of cross-disciplinary public lecture attendance and develop the lecture as form.
Sunday October 19th 2008, 1:44 am
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With the help of IASPIS (special thanks to Cecilia Widenheim and Suzi Ersahin) and ICR Stockholm (special thanks to Giorgiana Zachia and Dan Shafran) we made a research trip in Stockholm in order to establish contacts for our new upcoming PAVILION UNICREDIT center for contemporary art & culture.
We visited/met with the directors/curators from:
Iaspis (www.iaspis.com)
Marabou Parken (www.marabouparken.se)
Bonniers Konsthall (www.bonnierskonsthall.se)
Magasin 3 (www.magasin3.com)
Konsthall C (www.konsthallc.se)
Index (www.indexfoundation.se)
Botkyrka Konsthall (www.botkyrka.se)
Labyrint Press
Tensta Konsthall (www.tenstakonsthall.se)
BAC (www.balticartcenter.com)
Thank you for all the cooperation offers from all the directors above.
In the same time in Umea, at BildtMuseet was open the exhibition of Bucharest Biennale 3 (www.bildmuseet.umu.se)
04 July - 07 September 2008
Video- and Periodical-Archive
PAVILION
contemporary art & culture magazine
Bucharest, Rumania
Pavilion / # 10-11 What was socialism, and what comes next?, 2008
PAVILION is an art- and culture-magazine published in Bucharest and operating internationally. Its title refers to the relative, temporary structure of contemporary art. As a public platform it serves to introduce other projects and to extend the concept of the magazine.
The double edition �What Was Socialism And What Comes Next?� (#10-11) seeks to bring the discourse concerning (post-)socialism up to date and inquires into its relevance for contemporary art production. The current edition �Being Here. Mapping The Contemporary�(#12) conceives of itself on the one hand as documentation of the 3rd Bucharest Biennale, and on the other hand as a discourse-platform and reader for the exhibition. It is thematically structured around practices and processes of mapping.
30 July, 17.00 - Live talk with the editors Razvan Ion & Eugen Radescu
Images from the debate. From left to right in the above image: Eugen Radescu (chairman of Pavilion), Felix Vogel (curator of Bucharest Biennale 4), Razvan Ion (director of Pavilion), Anja Casser (curator, director of Badischer Kunstverein).
Wednesday June 04th 2008, 11:19 pm
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Brian Holmes lecture : “Escape the Overcode: Guattari�s Schizoanalytic Cartographies”
�Are you talking to me?� Live discussions on knowledge production, gender politics and feminist strategies. Participants: h.arta, Marina Grzinic, Post Conceptual Art Class.
“You come to see the show and you�ll get an extra burger!” A performance - dance show by Mihai Mihalcea & Solitude Project.
“Art, sport, and shopping � from modernist utopia to neoliberal dystopia.” Lecture of Ben Seymour and Anthony Iles (UK).
Utopia Travel. A project by: Emanuel Danesch and David Rych
(images from the opening night)
Safe Mapping AKA They Are Watching!
Artists: Loading Open LAB aka Magdalena & Bogdan Pelmus, Bucharest, Romania, Ulysses Castellanos, Faisal Anwar, Theo Pelmus, Ottawa & Toronto, Canada.
Physical-Emotional Map of the Capital City. A lecture by Anca Ionita
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Despre Razvan Ion
Razvan Ion este teoretician, activist politic, co-editor al revistei Pavilion si co-director Bucharest Biennale (Bienala Internationala de Arta Contemporana Bucuresti). A tinut cursuri si prelegeri la University of California-Berkeley, Headlands Center for the Arts-California, O3one- Belgrade, Facultatea de Stiinte Politice-Cluj, Facultatea de Arte-Timisoara, etc. A expus ca artist in spatii importante din Europa, SUA si Asia. A publicat in mai multe reviste si ziare, a realizat emisiuni de televiziune. A studiat management cultural in New York si San Francisco. Este membru al EAPC (European Association of Political Consultants).
COPYRIGHT PAVILION & THE AUTHORS. ALL RIGHTS RESERVED IN ALL COUNTRIES. THE VIEW EXPRESSED IN THIS PAGES ARE NOT NECESSARILY THOSE OF THE PUBLISHERS. PAVILION IS A REGISTERED MARK OF ARTPHOTO ASC.
