vector 2_1.cdr - Universitatea de Arte "George Enescu"

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[1] From the Curating
Contemporary Art MA at the Royal
College of Art in London. My
colleagues were: Jonathan Carroll
(Ireland), Elena Crippa (Italy) and
Tobi Maier (Germany).
[2] Academy Remix symposium
was organized by the Staatliche
Hochschule für Bildende Künste -
Städelschule, Frankfurt/Main, in cooperation
with Missing Identity,
Kosovo, and relations (relations -
a project initiated by the German
Federal Cultural Foundation).
[3] e-cart is an independent art
magazine, published on the internet
at www.e-cart.ro. Between 2003
2006 it functioned as an informal
structure, and from 2006 it is one
of the projects of the association
E-cart.ro, based in Câmpina,
România. e-cart.ro team: Eduard
Constantin, Mădălin Geana,
Angelica Iacob, Simona Nastac and
Raluca Voinea.
[4] This is also the kind of project
we tried to emphasize constantly in
the previous issues of e-cart, when
presenting CAA, the project of Lia
Perjovschi, H.arta art space in
Timişoara or Protokoll studio in
Cluj.
with more or less social or political issues. Observing the difficulty of the
art students to think their art in terms of “project-based”, in a system where
both the art market and education still privilege the production of objects (and
this is not a characteristic specific of Eastern Europe only), Ekaterina Degot also
points to the danger of the artificial elaboration of projects under the impulse of
the topic of the day or the motivation of a market which can sell “projects” just
as well as objects.
The challenge to encourage the artists to pursue valid projects,
determined by their obsessions and genuine long-term interests is certainly one
of the tasks of the art educator, but it becomes also the concern of curators. It
was definitely the desire to expose some of what we considered to be such
projects that motivated e-cart 7. However, when we gathered all the materials
together, interesting connections appeared, and made us aware of that
questions such as the one if there is a specificity to the art coming from this
region are legitimated, and even if things cannot be generalised, it is
nevertheless true that similarities in context determine affinities in the
responses to that context.
Thus, for example, the presence or absence of a Museum of
Contemporary Art in the countries we've passed through was approached in
their works by a few of the artists we met. The Presidential Palace is a project of
the Macedonian artist Oliver Musovik, who in 2003 reacted to the proposal of the
city planners in Skopje to convert the building of the Museum of Contemporary
Art into the residence of the President of the Republic, which, being a new
institution in Macedonia, only established after the independence of 1991, didn't
have a place of its own, being temporarily located in the building of the national
assembly. Pointing to the absurdity of installing a political institution in a
building which was designed from the beginning as a museum, without offering
any alternative instead, Oliver Musovik made a project in which he swapped the
identities of the two buildings, revealing not only very literally how the museum
would have looked like with the red carpet and the presidential guards at the
entrance, but also the degree in which art is always in a position of dependence
to political power.
A much more delicate and less humorous situation, that of MNAC in
Bucharest, was presented in e-cart 7 in an indirect way. In her project Off the
Map. In Bucharest, the architect and artist Ioana Marinescu presented her
research on the neighbourhoods in Bucharest destroyed to make place for
Ceausescu's “House of the People” and “Victory of Socialism” boulevard.
Interviewing people whose lives have been dramatically modified by the
“grandiose” plan, and looking in the archive materials which, some, are the only
witnesses of an erased memory, Ioana Marinescu talks about a site of absence.
Her research makes painfully visible a void which all attempts to fill with
meaning by the re-conversion of the House of the People and its surroundings
failed so far.
If the question We have a museum, is it good? seems to be suspended for
the moment in Romania, the Bulgarian artist Ivan Moudov raised another
question, in 2005: We don't have a museum for contemporary art, so why don't
we open one? He devised a clever media campaign to advertise the opening of
the Museum for contemporary art in Sofia. Using the journalistic rhetoric and
playing with the expectations and with the national myths (announcing the
presence of the Bulgarian-born artist Christo at the opening), Ivan Moudov
actually succeeded in bringing a diverse crowd for the fake opening, including
ambassadors and other official representatives. If a contemporary art
institution is legitimised also by the protocols that surround it, then certainly the
museum in Sofia was officially open. It now remains to be built, but what is more
interesting is the young artists' confidence that such an institution is needed,
although, in Sofia as in Bucharest, the scarcity of resources for contemporary
art production and exhibiting should require other structures, more dynamic
and better fit to stimulate this context.
We actually presented some of these structures too in the magazine, all of
which are independent artist's initiatives: we looked at the galleries Press to Exit in
Skopje and Exit in Peje, Kosovo, or at the Periferic Biennial, as different kind of
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projects, where the artists are creating frameworks rather than works .
Interrupted Histories, the exhibition opened at the Moderna Galerija
Ljubljana in April 2006 - which we presented as a sort of conclusion for this issue -,
was a confirmation that far from being isolated phenomena, practices of artists
assuming this agency in their own contexts and taking up the roles of not only
curators, but also archivists, historians, anthropologists, etc. are current in many of
the non-Western spaces.
There were other projects, also included in e-cart 7, which we, the travelling
group of curators, found very inspiring on this trip, in the way they were connected
to our discussions in London. The book of Hardt and Negri, Empire, raised heated
arguments in our seminars so it was really conforting and funny to discover the
critical engagement with this book and the literature around it of the Hungarian
artist Szacsva y Pál. His installation Empire in Different Colours and the more recent
video A Walk Through Empire are both witty comments on an intellectual debate
which takes place often only in the space of academia and which would certainly
need a touch of lightness and a reconsideration of the distance we have towards
very heavy concepts. Just like the camera of Szacsva y Pál, which follows an ant
literally walking through the pages of Empire and magnifies words such as “work”,
“capitalism”, “exploitation”, “critique”, the effect being that the size of the words is
in direct contradiction to their meaning.
Maybe the most important “discovery” that we made on this trip was in fact a
confirmation, that in spaces which are not yet contaminated by a very strict set of
rules most often dictated by the market or by a discourse infinitely reproducing
itself one is more likely to find unexpected answers and fresh approaches towards
issues that can be otherwise just as pressing everywhere. As for the specific
urgencies of each place, such as the ones we encountered in the Balkans, they for
sure need more context to be understood than the one which an art magazine can
build.
Translated by Raluca Voinea
Sofia - the clock counting the
days left until Bulgaria joins
the EU (more minimal than
the one in Bucharest)
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