WRO Art Center presentation and screening
Tuesday 18 / 11 / 08 18h00
supported by the Polish Cultural Institute in Bucharest
The new WRO Art Center (Centrum Sztuki WRO), located at Plac Teatralny 5, Wrocław, arose from the experience and activity of the WRO Foundation Media Art Center, founded in 1989, the only independent organization in Poland specializing in contemporary art, media and technology. The WRO Art Center features regular presentations of contemporary art intertwined with the development of communications tools and processes.
The WRO Art Center offers exhibitions, showings, concerts, screenings, lectures, workshops and publications featuring both Polish and international art. It is designed for artists, curators, critics and art theoreticians as well as for the active and creative culture-oriented public, while original projects cultivating creativity encourage children and teenagers to get familiar with media art. The Center’s aims are to support artistic and educational activities, and to organize international cultural and intellectual exchanges by expanding the WRO collection, making it accessible, collaborating with renowned international art galleries and institutions and through a program of residencies for artists and curators. The WRO Art Center’s gallery, laboratory, archives, reading room and offices are housed in the renovated heritage interiors in the loft of the former Otto Stiebler coffee-roasting plant at the corner of Wrocław’s Plac Teatralny and Widok Street. The specially designed Widok Street façade and entryway also serves as a projection screen in the public space. The Center is open to the public from Tuesday through Sunday. The WRO Art Center is funded by the City of Wrocław and is based on the agreement between the WRO Foundation and the Wrocław municipal authorities.
The presentation will be followed by the screening of several video works from the centre’s archive:
1. Aki Nakazawa, Negai wo hiku, Japan / Germany 2006, 4:35 (premiul I)
2. Pascual Sisto, 28 Years in the Implicate Order, USA 2005 (premiul II)
3. Stadtmusik, Mauerpark, Austria 2007, 17:25 (menţiune specială)
4. Jonas Nilsson, Me & Myself, Sweden 2006, 3:00
5. Dawid Marcinkowski, Sufferrosa, Poland 2007
6. Kurt d'Haeseleer, Fossilization, Belgium 2005, 09:09
7. Łukasz Gronowski, Untitled Works, Poland 2007, 4:46
8. Tal Amiran, Untitled (Band in a Studio), UK 2006, 2:33
9. Istvan Kantor, Revolutionary Song, Canada 2006, 9:32
10. Laurent Vicente, Superarchiskate, France 2006 / 2007, 3:48
11. Dominik Boberski, Estate, Poland 2006, 4:32
12. Jae-kyu Byun, Moving Panorama, Japan 2006, 4:05
13. Monsieur Moo, Neon, France 2005, 00:58
14. Volker Schreiner, Cell, Germany 2006, 4:27
14 November 17h00
FEMINIST ART IN MEXICO: A PERSONAL JOURNEY
Is feminist art relevant in today's globalized world?
Monica Mayer will share her experiences as a feminist artist over the past thirty years and discuss the social, political and aesthetic issues that have interested different generations of women artists. Monica Mayer is present in
Mónica Mayer (Mexico City, 1954), studied visual arts at the Escuela Nacional de Artes Plásticas in
A major area of Mayer’s work has been performance art. In 1983 she formed Polvo de Gallina Negra, the first feminist art group in
Opening: Thursday, 16 October 19h00
WHILE YOU WERE SLEEPING
16-31 October 2008
Artists: Lavinia German, Alex Grigoras, Bogdan Vatavu/ Andrea Hajtajer/ Dumitru Oboroc/ Mihai Verestiuc
Curator: Cristian Nae
A project run by the Studio for art practices and debates (coordinated by Catalin Gheorghe & Cristian Nae)
Assuming a puzzling impossibility of recording recent history, the exhibition takes as a starting point the erosion of the historical speech inscribed within public icons and effigies, constituted at the crossroad of fragmentary narratives and empty rhetorical speeches which legitimate them, denying the possibility of their solid coagulation. They facilitate critical numbness and constantly reproduce forgeries of public values seemingly erected overnight.
Playfully mimicking the masks of borrowed formal identities, the works in the show assume the possibility of exercising criticism by temporary appropriation, simulation and redistribution of conventional signs of power. Their common discursive practice lies in reinterpreting “monumentality” as sculptural embodiment of transience, imprecision and contingency. They stimulate conflicting aesthetics and critically use their symbolic potentiality. Ironically approached in its political and ideological function, the monument, understood as the name of the economy of public values and sign of persistence and durability, is transformed into a performative element of the proposed scenario, being often twisted on the verge of critical parody.
Referring in particular to the expectancies towards the stakes of contemporary public sculpture, the exhibition’s discourse aims to perform a temporary artistic intervention on the socio-political Romanian present-day representations, by constantly theatrically staging their own situation, caught between uncertain future projections, ideological heritage and blurred present-day public identities. (Cristian Nae)
The studio for art practices and debates is an educational platform for critical research and art production run by Vector Association in collaboration with the Research Center organized within the Faculty of Fine Arts, Decorative Arts and Design, Iasi.
INTERVENTIONS3
artistic interventions in public space
public presentation
October 10, 2008 | 4 pm
a project by Oberliht Association
– film projection
– presentation of the catalogue
– launch of 7th issue of STATE of EMERGENCY magazine/Oberliht Supplement
– debates with project participants
Project director, curator – Vladimir US
Co-curator – Nataša BODROZIC
The INTERVENTIONS3, artistic project dealing with public space took place in the city of Chisinau’s and its surroundings throughout August this year. The project gathered more than thirty participants from Moldova, Romania, Croatia, Germany and France who stayed in the city for a short term residency creating art works and reflecting over the processes producing Chisinau’s public space today, the city's visual structure, the memory and experience of its inhabitants' everyday life.
Their stay is documented in the catalogue, in two different issues of STATE of EMERGENCY magazine / Oberliht Supplement and in a film that is going to be shown on this occasion.
27 June 2008
The White Night of Cultural Institutes
program proposed by the Goethe Institute Bucharest
Timeline:
18h00 Film making in the
19h00 Tent event with Pavel Braila – performance by video artist Pavel Braila (Chisinau/Berlin)
20h00 Generation Chisinau – the perspectives of film making in Moldova (this program has also been presented aty the Berlin Film Festival – balkan black box film, art, and culture in South-Eastern Europe)
- documentary: San Sanych / San Sanych
Director: George Agadjanean, 59 min, English subtitles, Moldova 2006
(DOK Leipzig 2006, Cottbus 2006, Jilava Festival 2007, Cronograf 2007)
- short movies:
Dying for
Director: Igor Cobileanski, 22 min, English subtitles,
Cind se stinge lumina / When the Lights go out
Director: Igor Cobileanski, 8:20 min, English subtitles, Moldova 2006
MOLD_GOLIA, 60 min., English subtitles,
16-20 June 2008 / Opening: Monday 16 June 19h00
Alina Popa & Irina Gheorghe
Poto&Cabengo
Work in progress
„Poto and Cabengo are two twins from South California who refuse to communicate with the people around them and invent a language of their own. The director Jean-Pierre Gorin makes in 1979 a documentary about them; the twins are eventually normalized through a learning process which deprives them not only of their imagination, but also of the fascination they had on the others.
This story was the starting point of a photographic investigation about the I-you relation which can become I-I, about the endless movement of the glance from one figure to the other. Poto&Cabengo is a series of staged double self-portraits in different places and situations, a way of telling personal and fictive stories in a certain location.
The discourse can follow different directions, it is an open script, whose presentation as a work in progress emphasizes not only the importance of the autonomous images, but also the possible narrative links among them.” (Alina Popa & Irina Gheorghe)
The White Night of Art Galleries: 23 May 2008 18h00
Project Zagreb: Transition as Condition, Strategy, and Practice
Eve Blau and Ivan Rupnik
Transition is a condition that creates opportunities for architecture and urbanism. Zagreb is the perfect site for examining this generative dynamic: practicing in conditions of continuous instability, its architects and planners developed strategies for creatively engaging the conditional and openended— for anticipating and instrumentalizing the condition of irresolution. Moving between texts, maps, and diagrams, Project Zagreb reads the city as an open work, dynamic but coherent, in which architecture plays an active role in the formation of both urban practices and the city itself. This project is presented through four projections including diagrams, historical photographs, historical films, as well as contemporary stop-frame films.
Tuesday 13 May 2008 19h00
Artist talk: Anetta Mona Chisa
Romantic Economies
Anetta Mona Chisa was born in Romania. She studied sculpture and conceptual art at the Academy of Fine Arts in Bratislava, Slovakia (1994-2000) and since 2002 she is teaching at the Academy of Fine Arts in Prague, New Media department.
In 2006 she won the Slovak young visual artists award Oskar Cepan and was a resident artist at ISCP New York City. Her works have been showed recently at Milano Flash Art Show, Thyssen-Bornemisza Art Contemporary Vienna, Futura gallery Prague, f.a.i.t. gallery Cracow, Prague Biennial, Kunstraum Kreuzberg/Bethanien Berlin, Space gallery Bratislava, Turner Contemporary Margate, Museums Quartier Vienna and Billboart Gallery Europe.
Most of her works are contextual, based on personal stories and very often she plays with the concept of access to different forms of power: professional, political, ideological, and geographical. Her artistic practices vary from stealing in private art galleries, going to fortuneteller to talking about sexy men and doing porn movies and photographs with her often collaborator Lucia Tkacova.
www.chisa-a.net
Monday 12 May 2008 17h00
Can there be an Identity Overdose if you are an artist?
artist talk by Luchezar Boyadjiev (Bulgaria)
In his works, Luchezar Boyadjiev examines the visual and aesthetic consequences of the politic, economic, social and relational changes in ex-socialist capital cities like Sofia,Bucharest, Budapest, Moscow but also Istanbul, reshuffling an urban world that has been filled up with meanings.
Luchezar Boyadjiev, born in 1957, graduates as art historian at the National Academy of Arts, Sofia in 1980. He has been taking part in the most important Biennials of the world since the beginning of the 1990s (Prague and Moscow in 2007, Singapore and Iasi/Periferic 7 in 2006, Istanbul and Venice in 2005 etc.). Photography, Conceptual Art and New Media are his main fields of interest. Luchezar Boyadjiev also works as art critic, publicist and curator.
PRIVATE HABITATS
24-28 March 2008Opening: Monday, 24 March 18h00Eugen Alupopanu, Marinela Botez, Sabina Borhan, George Cernat, Claudiu Ciobanu, Adrian Crasmaru, Ciprian Croitoru, Mihai Ene, Miruna Nicolaev, Petru Padurariu, Gheorghita Elena Vornicu, Maria Vornicu
PRIVATE HABITATS subjectively describes in a cinematographic-like narrative the perspectival dissolution of the everyday urban life, by means of a parallel montage of pictorial fragments of intimate living space, contrasted with painterly and sculptural representations of urban atopias. The private habitats suggested imaginary reconstruct the disrupted space of an ordinary Romanian apartment, in which a trivial and claustrophilic existence of anonymous individuals takes place in an absurd routine and lack of human communication. The space of this uncanny narrative questions, sometimes suspending, the borders between the real, the phantasmal and the virtual, as well as those between the private and the public space. (Cristian Nae)
The Human Fabric
Elena Andrei & Teodora Visineanu
26/02 – 14/03/2008
Opening: Tuesday, 26 February 19h00
Through selfportraiture, minute analysis of detail or by means of a multitude of creatures that appear in the works, the two young artists are involved in a dialogue with each other as well as in a discussion with their audience on the subject of what lies beneath daily routine and the web of things and happenings that so often distract us from what is truly important.
PASSATO PROSSIMO
photographs by Michele Bressan and Bogdan Girbovan
21 – 31/01/2008
Opening: Monday 21/01/08 19h00
UNAgaleria
Str. G-ral Budisteanu 10, sector 1, Bucuresti
In my attempt to write a text for the exhibition Passato Prossimo, I cannot escape a definition of photographers that I recently heard, a definition that for me is equal in profoundness to a saying of Hagi, the football player: „Football is football and the ball is round”. It is said that there are two kinds of photographers: the hunter and the farmer... Fortunately, Michele Bressan and Bogdan Girbovan do not fit into any of these categories...
At the time when Michele has started taking photographs, quite recently, Tom Waits launched three albums at once: Brawlers, Bawlers and Bastards... and, similarly, one could define his style of photography: a mixture of rush with sentimentalism and possession, a combo of hunter and farmer and something more. Something tender which cannot be explained but pleases the eye.
At the time when Bogdan began photographing, nothing important was going on. Hence, his images „have a voice of their own” ... quite literally! As in: the farmer meets the hunter and tells him something. Something brief that cannot be put into words yet it is pleasurable...
The exhibition in UNAgaleria is also a demonstration of craftsmanship in developing gelatin silver prints. Ten photographs of 100x150 cm., fiber based matte paper mounted on aluminium, limited edition of five plus a few small pictures perfect for framing, unlimited edition. On one hand leica format photographs taken with about 15 different cameras (indeed, Bressan carries a small camera in every pocket for fear of missing out on something) with grainy negatives and on the other hand medium format images, pure 6x7, taken with a heavy camera that releases the shutter in a loud yet firm manner. (no connection to Bresson)
These two students are worth looking after in their future artistic activity and, moreover, together with their peers, they shape a generation of students from the photography and video department that shows a lot of promise for the future.
Nicu Ilfoveanu, curator
The Key Spot
11 – 17/01/2008
Opening: Friday 11/01/2008 18h00
Oana Barleanu, Adrian Branea, Lucia Dumitrescu, Mihai Ilie, Maria Marin, Mihai Mihail, Emilia Panicu, and Bogdan Vornicu
The works presented are deformed images that, due to the laws of perspective, can be recomposed from a certain spot in order to form the correct image. The images realised through anamorphosis can be recomposed: either directly, in front of an observer placed at the key spot, or indirectly, in certain reflective surfaces (regular, conical or cylindrical mirrors). Anamorphosis can be a useful technique in fine arts because it forms images that are abstract at the same time as mimetic and also because it can be recomposed from a certain key spot that can be aesthetically exploited by the artist. Moreover, the anamorphoses harbour a degree of surprise and interactivity with the observer - participant in the re-shaping of the correct image.
Curator, arch. Bogdan Vornicu