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26/11/2014

Five exhibitions

MNAC - The National Museum of Contemporary Art, Bucharest

Bucharest Artistic Education and Romanian Art After 1950
28.11.2014 – 14.06.2015

curated by
Adrian Guță

Out of the 150 years of existence the National University of Arts in Bucharest is celebrating on this occasion, more than a third of it the most recent, has been mapped and investigated throughout this exhibition. The unifying criterion for the inevitably diverse and judicious selection has been the relationship each and every one of the selected had with what was known during the 1950s to the 1990s as the “Nicolae Grigorescu” Institute of Plastic Arts, called nowadays in short, UNArte. Therefore it is an exhibition that actually brings together both teachers and students, the latter of whom sometimes became teachers in their own right.

The six and a half decades of continuous activity brought to light by this exhibition can roughly be divided into two distinct chapters conjoint on the milestone of 1989. The first chapter was ideologically marked by the coordinates of the totalitarian communist regime; however, the University managed to provide students with a fair level of professional rigour and especially after the stage of socialist realism, with an actual broadening of artistic perspective. The main drives to contribute to the consistency in artistic value for many of the exponents in UNArte’s different generations of students (beside the innate qualities of the students) were the pedagogical and artistic qualities of several dedicated teachers. The art of the 60s and 80s (disregarding the official conformist art) stands to prove this.

The beginning of the 90s brought major changes of title and statute, structure, staff and curriculum; the former institute became an academy, a university in 1998 and finally national university in 2002. The newly appointed younger teachers who were also emerging or fully established artists on the local and international art stage consistently contributed to the acceleration of these transformations.

UNArte is committed today to an on-going process of integration into the European artistic higher education system through educational programs such as ERASMUS, aimed to grow cultural mobility and exchange of best practices for its students. UNA Gallery – the University’s own gallery and an open practice space for students also stands to prove the importance of the curatorial exercise and the experience of being exhibited in the strategy of the University.

It is indeed fair to say that the Romanian art scene is significantly represented and influenced by teachers and former students of UNArte, with no intention of suggesting that the present selection would be in any way a complete and absolute reflection of the entire Romanian contemporary art ensemble.
The exhibition packs an eclectic body of painting, sculpture, drawing, art object, installation, photography and video art spanning on more than one generation of artists whose works had been chosen for the representativeness of discourse in relation to the expression medium.
The selection was made possible with the combined effort of all the institutions involved, whose own collections were a valuable resource and starting point. Namely, in order of the number of works kindly made available: The National Museum of Contemporary Art, The National University of Arts, City of Bucharest Museum, private collections and artist collections.
Considering the title and mission of the exhibition, the selection displays iconic works of both well-established artists and artists who seem to have been almost forgotten, while also uncovering lesser known works or rarely exhibited ones such as diploma projects or works from student years.

The exhibition reveals major trends that used to define and still define our visual arts outside most of the monolithic body of the official communist art (only some interesting reverberations of it have been included). Different flavours of realism, neo-pop and new photorealism coexist with lyrical abstraction, neo-expressionism with stances of conceptual art and to some extend with post-Brancusi shape reductionism in sculpture. Some hints of surrealism blended together with staged photography are clearly traceable in painting and drawing while neo-orthodoxism walks side by side with the rectified readymade. Despite so many variations, a subtle feeling of belonging to a distinct cultural family is dominant at a higher level of perception.
This exhibition does not aim to claim for itself a title of absolute infallibility in terms of Romanian art history even if each and every work presented or perhaps all together as well contribute to this (hi)story. No doubt about it, different approaches to such long time scale and wide range of artist could and should of course apply outside this current curatorial intention.
Adrian Guţă

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What about y(our) memory
28.11.2014 – 02.02.2015

curated by
Irina Cios, Iosif Király

Organized on the occasion of the 150th anniversary of the Bucharest National University of Arts, the exhibition brings together artists who have / were trained in the frame of the Department of Photography and Moving Image, founded in 1995. During its almost 20 years of existence, this department has shaped a formative endeavor centered on multidisciplinarity and conceptual dialogue. The professors who coordinate the department have a sustained artistic activity and have become prominent figures on the international art scene. They set up an educational structure meant to provide students with a solid base of information regarding contemporary practice, artistic and theoretic tendencies. Each of the three years of undergraduate study, offer the students the opportunity to be guided by several artists, enabling thus the experience of various approaches regarding the recorded image processing, static or moving, in its dual role as communication tool and a medium of artistic creation. Further on, master studies invite to a multidisciplinary dialogue aimed at strategies of artistic creation, image and space theory, sociology, philosophy, literature, communication and so on.

Synchronous with a shift of visual paradigm, the onset of this department inBucharestcontributed to the consolidation of photography, video art and multimedia artistic status. The emergence of the photographic medium accelerated the process of creation and implicitly the communication one, activating the eye not only in the reception but also in the realization of the image. The gesture and the intervention on the support have not been excluded but integrated on another level. The revealing capacity not only refers to the photographic process but also to the selection and revelation of otherwise hardly perceivable aspects of reality. The founders of the Photography and Moving Image Department were among the agents of establishing video and photography as fields of visual experimentation inRomania- a symptom of Post-modernity from the 70’s – 80’s.

The Department’s activities explore media which activate image as well as time. Such media capture and fix a moment in time that is updated with each visualisation. These media witness and preserve but also make the image travel through time making the viewer part of the original experience updated through the emotions that it generates. They are a trigger of memory that reveals not only the history of events but even more the subjective life, the traumas and obsessions which mark the individual and collective subconscious.

The Department’s program of studies starts with the conceptual redefinition of the field of image as a filter of visual universe and of identity as performativity and belonging. It promotes various artistic approaches. On one side it explores both analogue media and digital resources. On the other side it enables the dialogue with the classic media of creation – such as drawing, painting, sculpture – and object, assemblage, or installation. The embrace of the state of transition brings about „art in project”, the process, the participation. There is an exploration of the conceptual discourse that often translates as a form of resistance towards the aestheticized attitude. The image absorbs the languages promoted by mass media. The more society shows a tendency towards uniformisation and globalisation, the more support is given to the expression of particularity and individuality.

These are some of the research directions that shape the activity of the Photography and Moving Image Department and underpin the discourse of the artists which form or have been formed here. One of the most dynamic departments in the National University of Art, it contributes, with each generation, to the formation of established personalities, having their own discourse and being appreciated through prizes, participations in international exhibitions, residencies etc. The current exhibition showcases several points of reference of the energies that have coagulated in the two decades of existence. It facilitates a dialogue between artists and students from several generations which find themselves at various stages in their career. The diversity of artistic approaches spans from photo-video introspective research to interactive multimedia installations or institutional critique and social activism.

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New Beginnings
28.11.2014 – 29.03.201

curated by
Sandra Demetrescu, Misela Blanusa

Situated at the crossing between the contemporary history of the post-yugoslavian space and the evolution of the Belgrade Museum of Contemporary Art and its collection, the selection presented in the framework of this exhibition aims at capturing an image – an inevitably fragmentary one – of the very recent past of the Serbian artistic scene. The option of narrowing down the selection, almost exclusively, to new media works originates in an interrogation regarding the meaning of the image (especially the digital, virtual one), which fluctuates between visibility and projection, between being an object of memory and a trigger for the act of remembering.

The materiality of the results of artistic practices is confronted with a an apparently paradoxical void in representation, at the point in which the artistic object either vanishes in the passing of time, or stands as a witness for its own inability of preserving a material trace, or, when disclosing some underrepresented realities, it attests a certain dialectic of the image (such as it is configured between being a document and being absent, between regain and loss).

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Disposition in time and space
28.11.2014 – 29.03.2015

curated by
Adrian Bojenoiu

The Mobile Biennale 1 – Oltenia Tour in 7 days – that took place between 28 July – 3 August created a context that short-circuited the presumed logic of art representation by the cancellation of the exhibition space. The representation space was over-extended to geographical dimensions (Oltenia Region) so as to deconcentrate the look upon some objects, images or situations generally presented as art. The exhibition project Dispositions in Time and Space reverts to the white cube representation.

The biennale aims at positioning the art discourse in relation to the two universal coordinates Time and Space but also to its own present, creating a speculative context, that was the starting point for the MB participants in the creation of works of art.
The curatorial theme brings up the mobility (understood as complex relational factor) and requests the participants to deliver their own discourse both in relation to the present, as a position undertaken, as well as in relation to the movement and evolution of what we call art. Also, another key aspect is how they define their current commitment to art through an unconditional relation to these two universal coordinates, Time and Space whose absence renders any discourse impossible.

Therefore, although dealing with topics related to social, political, architectural or language themes, the works on display can be interpreted as devices for ontological orientation or forms of dialogue and negotiation of the two existential coordinates.
The purpose of this thematic approach, seen as a whole, is to turn the art discourse onto itself, in a sort of attempt to emphasise the current range.

The exhibition is accompanied by a series of international conferences and debates gathered under the title Being Art. Materiality of Art Discourse and Its Extensions.

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Deimantas Narkevicius
Cupboard and a Song
28.11.2014 – 29.03.2015

curated by
Călin Dan

Deimantas Narkevičius pulls out the images stored in our heads through the subtle processes of (collective) memory, and translates them into phantoms of a resilient past that haunts mercilessly but gently the present. Working mostly with cinematic means (cinema – the medium of phantoms revival par excellence), the artist remains a believer in the virtues of space as a container of public tensions and a promoter of sculpture as a healer of historical traumas.

Image: Radoš Antonijević Tent, Museum of Contemporary Art“, 2012, 240 x 300 x 400 cm, burlap, metal, wood, rope.

Press contacts:
Raluca Velisar raluca@mnac.ro
Larisa Sitar medialab@mnac.ro
tel. 0040-21-3189137, fax. 0040-21-3189138

Opening: Thursday, 27.11.2014, 19.30
22.15h Concert PC Harem (in the framework of Cannibal Disco) 2nd floor
22.30–24h Cannibal Disco (party with Scoromide) cafeteria, 4th floor

MNAC The National Museum of Contemporary Art, Bucharest (MNAC)
The Palace of the Parliament, wing E4 Izvor St. 2 - 4 050563 Bucharest
Romania
Open: Wednesday – Sunday 10 am – 6 pm
Entrance free

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