Heroism Rises in a Warehouse
Opening: Thursday, 5 March, 19.00
5 March – 24 May, 2015
Artists: Simion Cernica, Claudiu Cobilanschi, Ion Dumitrescu & Florin Flueraș,
Paul Dunca & Ștefan Tiron & Mihai Lukacs, Alex Fifea & Cătălin Rulea & David
Schwartz, Irina Gheorghe, Ivana Mladenovic, Zamir Suleymanov, Iulia Toma
Selection by Mona Vătămanu & Florin Tudor
Discussion with Ion Dumitrescu and Florin Flueraș
Thursday, 5 March, 18.00
Performance “You didn’t see nothing!”
Alex Fifea, Cătălin Rulea, David Schwartz
Saturday, 7 March, 19.30
Sunday, 8 March, 19.30
For this season’s exhibition generated by the open call for emerging artists,
Salonul de proiecte invited Mona Vătămanu and Florin Tudor to select the works
to be produced for the occasion. A work by the artist Zamir Suleymanov
(Azerbaijan) was chosen by Vătămanu and Tudor to guide them in the selection
process. Suleymanov’s film is the catalyst for the whole exhibition, which
questions from multiple viewpoints the continuity between cinema/film and
reality. Documenting the activities that take place in a former cinema
converted into a “playground” for young people who seem to spend their whole
lives there, the artist makes visible the fact that the space of the cinema—the
place where all these things happen—has been invaded by reality. By extension,
the space of the exhibition is one in which the fissures in reality become
visible, comprising multiple incursions into zones of social exclusion or
putting together proposals aimed at transforming reality’s immediate givens.
Ion Dumitrescu and Florin Flueraș present a recording of a collective action
that took place on the 1st of December 2010 at the AFI Palace Cotroceni mall in
Bucharest, a subversive infiltration of the regime of the spectacle that
characterises contemporary existence, which rests under the sign of rampant
capitalism, an infiltration that aimed temporarily to short-circuit it and
provoke reflection about what the “stage sets” and reality in question involve.
The decision to show the mall action in the form of a film raises questions
about the limits of the post-spectacle concept and generates a discussion with
the public that is scheduled before the opening of the exhibition. Moving from
the spectacle occasioned by the National Day celebrations to spectacles of a
religious type, the collective made up of Paul Dunca, Mihai Lukacs and Ștefan
Tiron imagine a “parish of the excluded”, which in their eyes reveals and
includes the limits of gender and sexuality in the philosophy and
practice of religion. This “parish” proposes a series of rituals that will
unfold throughout the period of the exhibition. David Schwartz’s contribution,
conceived together with Alex Fifea and Cătălin Rulea, draws attention to the
practices of another state institution, the police, practices that sometimes
become abusive towards people who are ethnically or socially vulnerable.
Setting out from the case of Daniel Dumitrache, who was killed inside a police
station, they construct a performance based on fictionalisation of the
documentary materials they archived during their research. Within the framework
of a film-essay with autobiographical overtones, Iulia Toma stages a
performance based on a ritual that her father, an army sergeant, meticulously
used to perform. She shifts the criticism of institutions found in the previous
projects towards a subjective area. The male figure, dominant in public and
institutional registers, is absent, almost invisible, in family life. The
subjective viewpoint and reflection on the past can also be found in Claudiu
Cobilanschi’s documentary essay, which tackles the recent history of the
strategic green houses and nurseries around the edge of Bucharest, which were
designed during the communist period, but which are now in ruins, overrun with
weeds and mounds of rubbish. For Irina Gheorghe, science and technology,
important pillars of the socialist utopia, provide the matter for a
para-scientific study that is situated at the boundary between the exact
sciences and the blurred areas where they are invaded by the inexact, the
unknown and the irrational.
Although they seem to form a heterogeneous corpus, traversed by various types
of subject and artistic practice, the projects selected by Mona Vătămanu and
Florin Tudor are united by the critical attention they pay to the social
context. Another example in this direction is the work of Simion Cernica, which
captures the moments of respite enjoyed by labourers who work in precarious
conditions, moments that are perceived as a collective ritual. Where Cernica
draws on a low-budget aesthetic and hidden camerawork from a distance, Ivana
Mladenovic draws her subject matter from the social medium, creating a purely
spectacular, cinematic moment. The character in her film Miss Piranda 2011 is
filmed in a theatrical way, in a single extended shot, in which seduction
manifests itself to an unseen viewer. Navigating through the raucous,
libido-charged world of turbo-folk, the character’s strategy is to conceal
herself by exposing herself, and the film exacerbates precisely this paradox.
The idea of the concealed/visible is also a defining feature of the other
contributions to the exhibition, which brings to the fore a series of
below-the-surface problems that elude the dominant perception of the social
space and the public discourse.
This project has been supported by ERSTE Foundation.
Supported by
Salonul de proiecte is a curatorial program of the National Museum of
Contemporary Art Bucharest, initiated by Magda Radu and Alexandra Croitoru. The
program focuses through exhibitions, presentations, and debates on the Romanian
contemporary art, while positioning young artists’ productions into a broader
generational context, local as well as international.
Team: Magda Radu, Alexandra Croitoru, Ștefan Sava and Dana Andrei
Salonul de proiecte
MNAC Anexa, 2nd floor
Calea Moșilor 62-68, Bucharest, Romania
Wednesday – Sunday / 10.00-18.00
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