BECAUSE WE NAVIGATE ON DIFFERENT LANES
08 may – 12 july 2014

Because we navigate on different lanes is the second exhibition of the current season to present proposals selected following open calls aimed at encouraging young artists active as part of Romania’s contemporary art scene. This time, the selection of works produced especially for the occasion was carried out by the Little Warsaw duo from Budapest (artists Bálint Havas and András Gálik).

For Vlad Basalici, a historical event cannot be pinned down within time in order to create a coherent narrative; what is preserved is an accumulation of moments, of micro-events that refuse to be connected with each other. Cristina Amelia Cândea puts forward a video installation that attempts to elucidate what occurs when “the zero moment of creation” arises. Spontaneous interactions with various objects translate into a series of impulses that cannot be framed within any concept. In the case of Mădălina Lazăr, the starting point is a work by Gerrit van Bakel, entitled Tarim Machine, first exhibited at Documenta 7 in Kassel in 1981, her own work forming an extended meditation on movement within space, a movement that is conceptualised as an exercise in endurance and patience. Veda Popovici is preoccupied with the issue of the migration of Romanian citizens to various parts of the world; she reflects on the condition of citizens who have no real status in the societies where they make their living, proposing an exercise that activates ethical conscience, designed to lead to an awareness of the huge difficulties confronting this social category. Szilárd Miklós brings to our attention an important landmark of Romanian contemporary art from the '90s – the performance festival from Lake Sf. Ana, a chapter too little revisited in the last years, here being approached from the angle of the difficulties which arise through attempts of historicising this moment from the present perspective.

In a period when a significant part of Romanian society has come to perceive visual art (if it perceives it at all) solely as a market product, when institutions that play a major cultural and educational role lend their support to art markets where dissonant promotion, jumbled registers, the validation of false reference points, and the instrumentalisation of art for commercial ends is unequivocally asserted, in such a context contemporary art that wagers on critical reflection, which claims an educational dimension for itself, which is deliberately non-spectacular, which prefers to question and to doubt, marks out a marginal place for itself, constructing for itself an identity separate from the non-productive and troublesome rhetoric that monopolises the public space. Unfortunately, even in this niche of contemporary art, the discourse is more often than not simplistic and focused on the spectacular, as institutional performance is today evaluated in terms of the number of visitors, or else it is opportunistic and calculated, wagering on the institution’s international image, all of which is to the detriment of the production of content and the establishment of a real relationship with the public and the local artistic scene. In this part of the year, events such as Art Safari, Galleries/Museums Night, and the Bucharest Biennale have forced us to re-evaluate once more the local context within which we operate and to re-affirm, via this exhibition, Salonul de proiecte‘s commitment to supporting the critical art produced by the local scene.

During the period of the exhibition, the Little Warsaw duo of artists will give a presentation of their artistic practice and Veda Popovici will organise a public debate that will be accompanied by a reader containing various personal accounts, studies and strategies connected with the topic of migration. Details of the events are to be announced.