MNAC - The National Museum of Contemporary Art
Bucharest
2-4 Izvor Street (Entrance Calea 13 Septembrie)
+40 21 3189137 FAX +40 21 3189138
WEB
Santiago Sierra
dal 13/10/2005 al 14/10/2005
WEB
Segnalato da

MNAC – The National Museum of Contemporary Art



 
calendario eventi  :: 




13/10/2005

Santiago Sierra

MNAC - The National Museum of Contemporary Art, Bucharest

The Corridor in the House of the People. The second episode of 'Under Destruction' – a series of site-specific interventions by international artists, invited to engage polemically the political significance of the new location of the museum. The corridor conceived by Serra will immobilize and obliterate the entire space of the museum, constraining visitors to a predetermined path of obsessive repetition.


comunicato stampa

The Corridor in the House of the People

Under Destruction #2

Curated by Mihnea Mircan

MNAC Bucharest will host Santiago Sierra’s largest project to date, as the second episode of Under Destruction – a series of site-specific interventions by international artists, invited to engage polemically the political significance of the new location of the museum.

Since October 2004, MNAC occupies a wing in the Palace of the Parliament, formerly known as the House of the People. The House of the People is the second largest building in the world, a product of terminal communist megalomania, disconnected from practical necessity and completely isolated from the life of the city.

After the 1989 Romanian revolution, it was re-branded as the product of the constructive genius of the nation and taken over by the new administrations. It can be described as the perfect backdrop for enacting the post-communist syndrome, it functions as the locus of Romania’s conflicted relation to its recent history and is featured in every guide as the main tourist attraction in Bucharest.

The corridor conceived by Santiago Sierra will immobilize and obliterate the entire space of the museum, constraining visitors to a predetermined path of obsessive repetition. The performance to be enacted in the corridor will produce the extreme actualization of a stereotype about Romania, a fragment of the rudimentary sociology that divides the world between advanced nations and nations smothered in their mediocre destiny, between winners and losers in the game of history.

A description repeatedly purported by media reports acquires the proportions of Greek tragedy. The performance suggests being trapped in preconception, waking up in a nightmare of purely schematic thinking, in an eyeless space deprived of depth and contours. The project adapts to the local context Santiago Sierra’s practice of testing the limits, their relevance and resilience, of pushing things to political and economic extremes, creating scenarios that work like exercises in agonizing futility, amassing obstacles and exacerbating antagonisms.

Santiago Sierra’s art builds upon contradiction – it starts from a question and complicates it until it becomes deafening. The project in Bucharest engages the logic of exclusion, the labeling and negotiation that occurs around and across real or imaginary borders. The corridor generates an extraterritorial space where two representations of the Romanian people – the enslaved mass indirectly, cynically portrayed by the ‘House of the People’ and the present-day cliché resulting from economic disparity or vastly reductive thinking – are confronted and collapsed.

MNAC – The National Museum of Contemporary Art. With the support of Prometeo arte contemporanea (Lucca) and Helga de Alvear Gallery (Madrid)

Performance: 14th October, 23.59 hrs

MNAC – The National Museum of Contemporary Art
Palace of the Parliament, Wing E4, 2-4 Izvor Street (access through Calea 13 Septembrie) - Bucharest 1 - Romania

For further information:
info@mnac.ro or 0040 722 135 157
http://www.santiago-sierra.com
http://www.prometeo-arte.it

IN ARCHIVIO [37]
Six exhibitions
dal 25/11/2015 al 19/3/2016

Attiva la tua LINEA DIRETTA con questa sede