EIGHT AND A HALF NEW WORKS
13 december 2011 –
29 january 2012

The exhibition features the works produced following the Open Call initiated by Salonul de proiecte. This is the first event out of a series of projects aimed at introducing works produced by young artists at the beginning of their career. Starting with the premise that in Romania the production possibilities in contemporary art are almost non-existent and that artists from newer generations are constantly challenged when it comes to the realization of their projects, Salonul de proiecte acts as a platform for encouraging artistic practices that address current social and political issues.

This exhibition showcases an eclectic, heterogeneous body of works, focusing on the role of the artist in the contemporary context and highlighting the importance of discursive practices and of communication systems. The projects make use of various media – from textual works and drawings to sculptural installations and the documentation of interventions in the public space.

Mihai Iepure-Gorski recycles the symbolism of pacifist movements by dividing the visual pattern into a succession of abstract compositions. Alexandra Pirici documents a series of public actions that deconstruct the ideology of symbolic landmarks in Bucharest, emphasizing the disproportionate relationship between the grandiloquence of monuments and the precarious condition of the individual and local institutions.

In the same spirit, Veda Popovici meditates on the status of the artist in both the artworld and the society, foregrounding his/her oscillation between activism and helplessness. Giving an active role to the spectator and transferring the information from the art space to the real world are distinctive features in the exhibition that also emerge in Răzvan Botiș’s proposal, who distributes an invitation to an exceptional event that will never take place. At the opposite end, Claudiu Cobilanschi documents the production of utilitarian objects relying on sketches published in the handbooks of the FRR collection (The Fan Club of Romanian Achievements) which feature various types of bricolage, widely encountered before 1989, but which, in today’s consumerist age, is a rare and almost absurd activity. Marina Albu’s interventions comprise a range of concrete actions by transforming the exhibition space into a waiting room that provides access to a separate space where a series of “Mind, Body & Spirit” services are offered to the public during the entire duration of the exhibition according to a weekly program. Cătălin Ilie focuses on the “process of searching” through a site-specific intervention whereby public is invited to decode Samuel Beckett’s poem What is the Word, which is recorded on a magnetic tape whose content is revealed only fragmentarily. The transfer of textual messages into a new linguistic code also appears in the work of Alexandra Bodea who illustrates a hybrid universe of tabloid press clichés filtered through the her own imagination.