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Biennale focuses on such practices
through a number of installations, environments
and performances, as well as
through the integration of projects within
existing presentation and distribution systems
outside traditionally conceived art
venues. While many of the artists engage
with the subjects of territories and histories,
risky and unstable positions or systems
of authority, they do so in a way that
is characterised by ambiguity, opacity,
non-linearity and the quasi-fictional, or by
tactics of subterfuge and infiltration. While
some use processes that are investigative
or slow in the making – expressing a kind
of resistance to the speed and instability
of everyday life – others turn to more
‘informal’ methodologies. As Simon
Sheikh points out, 'The field of art has
become-in short-a field of possibilities, of
exchange and comparative analysis. It
has become a field for alternatives, proposals
and models, and can, crucially, act
as a cross field, an intermediary between
different fields, modes of perception, and
thinking, as well as between very different
positions and subjectivities… '[3]
The application of more laissez-faire
approaches is dynamic and responsive
and can be difficult to pin down. It is particularly
resonant in Bucharest in terms of
political history, infrastructure and support
systems and conditions for artistic practice,
which themselves are in the process
of evolving. The informal has been identified
by several writers as connected to
societies that have experienced repression
or that have undergone political transition.
'A key feature of communism was
the organisation of society into formal and
informal spheres. Formally, communist
society was defined by a vast number of
laws, rules and regulations and the econ-
[6]
omy was regulated by short-term and
long-term plans. As laws were frequently
idealistic – and consequently also often
unrealistic – and plans (carrying the status
of law) usually too taut to be implemented,
informality became a useful tool
to circumvent the former and secure fulfilment
of the latter. It was also used by the
general public as a strategy for coping
with everyday life.'[4] During that time,
informal environments offered artists the
opportunity, albeit within limited circles, to
show and discuss their work.[5 ]
The informal can spring from popular culture,
quotidian events and the actions of
various kinds of 'subcultures.' Informal
structures have been recognized in different
sectors of society, not only in culture
but also in business and management, as
having the capacity to act like a shadow,
operating from the ground up. Such
approaches are well suited to artists
whose interests lie in ways of negotiating
the realms of 'nonfiction, facts, directions,
laws and … how systems work,' observing
their structure and behavior to investigate
'where their loopholes lie.'[6] The
potential of the informal in relation to
agency is also acknowledged in the
educational framework advanced by
Pavilion’s Free Academy, where informal
education is deemed more important and
vital than that of the formal system, and
where the type of citizen that participates
in social debate becomes more of an
agent of change who has the capacity to
get involved.[7]
With some artists in the Biennale, tactics
of subterfuge and infiltration are intrinsic
to their practice, whether their work takes
the form of documents of ‘tactical behavior,’
or situations that are playfully or
provocatively embedded within sites of
daily activity. In relation to how one
defines the public domain, it is important
to bear in mind William Pope.L’s comment
that agency 'is relative to context. It is not
natural and freely given … . Agency is a
negotiation, always mediated.'[8] As
Maria Lind points out, there are differences
between work that is 'context-sensitive'
as opposed to 'site-specific.' Lind
considers that 'recipes must be reformulated
for every occasion' since being context-sensitive
is more about being sensitive
to situations and a 'challenge to the
status quo – being context-sensitive with
a twist … .”[9] Within this framework, the
Biennale contains several projects that
generate spaces of encounter outside art
venues themselves, altering the expected
realities of a given context – whether this
is a cinema schedule, social space, or
publications on subjects other than art –
allowing for moments of confusion or
questioning, and ideally a curiosity as to
the origins and intentions of these interventions.
Such projects are not about the
mere dispersal of knowledge, but, in their
intentions and chosen contexts, seek to
be closer to what Simon Sheikh refers to
as 'networks of indiscipline, lines of flight,
and utopian questionings' that create
'spaces of thinking.'[10]
Information itself, in terms of how it is distributed,
researched, absorbed and represented
has of course been profoundly
affected by the internet. The circulation of
information and images has never been
greater, leading not just an 'expanded
sociality of the web but an accelerated,
highly visual, hybridized commons.' [11]
Patterns of learning about a subject have
been deeply affected by the Internet’s
ability to reveal formerly obscure or other-
wise concealed data, as well as its potential
to generate associative meaning
through multiple direct and tangential
searches. As John Conomos notes, we
are living 'in a world where the computer
and its attendant techno-utopian myths of
artifice, control and rationality create in us
a sense of reality that is becoming more
elaborate, more contingent, and more
dependent on digital languages of representation
– where the discourse between
cognition and epistemology, images and
knowledge is being radically alerted by
electronic technologies.'[12]
User-generated sources such as
Wikipedia, with its inherent potential
for multiple and possibly inaccurate
accounts, and the sheer act of researching
links and connections from one thing
to another online, provide rich material for
artists interested in more associative
structures, narratives and meanings.
Often seductive and formal in their aesthetic
presentation, their works are full of
word games, tangential logic, and what
may even seem flights of fancy, that render
simplistic interpretation impossible –
the consequences of a research and
thinking process that in its very nature
could be seen as a 'permission for knowledge
that is tangential and contingent and
whose sociability as it were, its search for
companionship, is based not on linearity
and centrality but on dispersal and on
consistent efforts at re-singularisation.'[13]
A strong component of the Biennale
involves a reworking of certain histories
from the civic to the personal, in a way
that is not always about nostalgia or narrative,
but is rather a deliberately constructed
perspective on the contemporary.
Whether referring to the architecture and
[7]