Call for papers by Maria Orosan Telea
Europe are encouraged to apply for this travelling research seminar that will take place during t... more Europe are encouraged to apply for this travelling research seminar that will take place during the academic year 2019/2020 and will consist of three one-week seminars organized in Poznań, Zagreb and Timișoara.
CALL FOR PAPERS
Conference ART, MEMORY AND IDENTITY
Faculty of Arts and Design, West University... more CALL FOR PAPERS
Conference ART, MEMORY AND IDENTITY
Faculty of Arts and Design, West University of Timisoara, Romania, 10th – 11th of April 2019
The Faculty of Arts and Design, West University of Timisoara, welcomes proposals for the 2019 Conference in the field of the history and theory of arts, which will be held in Timisoara in April 10-11. The conference is dedicated to ”Art, memory and identity” and is open to scholars and PhD candidates in history and theory of art, anthropology of art, philosophy, and visual artists.
During the history, social, religious and political programs and ideologies benefited from the capacity of arts to convey important messages directly to the minds and hearts of the people. From commissioned portraits of powerful people to memorials and triumph arches, visual arts participated in remembering the past, in spreading values and ideas, in creating lineages and identities. In the contemporary world, artists often demonstrate the aspiration to participate into the society (re)construction, and their voices become more and more critical of the well established institutions, state-sanctioned collective memory or official versions of the past.
The Conference aims to explore the connections between art, memory and identity, to examine how artists deal, deliberately or not, with the collective past and present. From papers that investigate how social memory impacts on artistic creation to works focusing on how art contributes to (re)shaping a common identity, theoretical perspectives and applied research are equally welcome. While contributions on any type of artwork will be considered, public art is a focus of the conference.
The Conference languages are English and Romanian.
DEADLINE
Please send a short presentation and an abstract of no more than 300 words to [email protected] and [email protected]. The deadline for proposal submission is February 1, 2019. Authors invited to attend the conference will be notified by 20th of February.
EXPENSES
There is no conference fee.
Limited financial assistance is available for travel costs reimbursement. The request for travel support must be submitted with the proposal.
Accommodation will be provided subject to availability.
Books by Maria Orosan Telea
Later Edit, 2020
DRAFT (draftcuratorialprogram.ro) is a curatorial program presenting
ongoing art projects, ideas ... more DRAFT (draftcuratorialprogram.ro) is a curatorial program presenting
ongoing art projects, ideas and experiments, partially completed
projects or larger-scale replicable samples. Conceptualization, research
and analysis are the key points in identifying the appropriate format
for their presentation. Exhibiting ideas or art works at intermediate
stage questions the vague boundaries between the creative process and
the definitive work. The aim is to make a frame stop in an ongoing
conceptual structure.
Interaction with the public becomes a generative premise and can
have a determined role in increasing or changing the trajectory of the
future project. Our desire is to create a context of contiguity and free
discussion, in which the transmitter and receiver constantly change
their roles.
Uneori, arta contemporană poate să pară intimidantă, greu de înțeles, complicat de explicat. Aces... more Uneori, arta contemporană poate să pară intimidantă, greu de înțeles, complicat de explicat. Acest ghid își propune să demonstreze că, din contră, arta contemporană este fascinantă și plină de surprize, prin perspectivele asupra lumii și societății, pe care le oferă.
Ghidul conține un scurt istoric al ultimilor decenii din arta românească, liste de artiști, câteva lucrări prezentate și explicate, un glosar de termeni, o selecție – românească și internațională – de muzee, galerii, evenimente de artă, colecționari, case de licitații, câteva indicii privind modul de funcționare a pieței de artă, o listă de surse de informare suplimentare. Toate acestea sunt instrumente de bază, care să conducă cititorul spre propriile concluzii.
Ceea ce încercăm să transmitem este că arta contemporană merită să fie descoperită fără prejudecăți, cu simpla dorință de a proiecta propriile înțelesuri asupra lucrărilor propuse de artiști.
Full text: http://www.orizonturiculturale.ro/Academis%20Maria%20OROSAN%20TELEA%202014.pdf
Articles by Maria Orosan Telea
Arta, 2023
Ultima serie de lucrări prezentate de Adrian Ghenie în expoziția personală deschisă în luna april... more Ultima serie de lucrări prezentate de Adrian Ghenie în expoziția personală deschisă în luna aprilie la Pavilion Isho din Timișoara se referă, în egală măsură, la o schimbare majoră, ireversibilă, consideră artistul, la care suntem martori. De această dată, pentru a transpune în pictură și desen momentul crucial actual, artistul face apel la corporalitate. “Corpul imposibil” vine la Timișoara în anul Capitalei Culturale, la invitația Fundației Art Encounters și a curatoarei Diana Marincu, după o pauză de paisprezece ani de la ultima expoziție personală a lui Adrian Ghenie în România.
Design Art Papers, 2022
Research in the field of recent art history resulted in the last decade (2010-2020) in the public... more Research in the field of recent art history resulted in the last decade (2010-2020) in the publication of important volumes that recover artistic practices in the countries of the former Soviet bloc, by using different selection filters and reading keys. New transnational narratives on the art in the socialist and post-socialist period have thus emerged, adding to other older publications, most of which focused on issues particular to each national context. The present study, carried out following the methodology of bibliographic research, analyses three of the most important volumes published between 2010 and 2020. More precisely, the way in which Romanian art from 1960 to 2020 is presented and integrated into the context of Central-Eastern Europe.
The three volumes this study refers to are: Piotr Piotrowski, Art and Democracy in Post-Communist Europe (2010), Klara Kemp-Welch, Networking the Bloc: Experimental Art in Eastern Europe 1965-1981 (2018) and Maja and Reuben Fowkes, Central and Eastern European Art Since 1950 (2020). One of the criteria for selecting these books is the fact that they are all books written by one author, and not collective volumes with polyphonic voices. Also, the common feature of the three volumes lies in their positioning in the sphere of academic research, with a general and comparative view of the region, even if from case to case some countries are privileged over others. Thus, we have excluded volumes, whether single-authored or collective, that nuance the research and deal only with a particular type of artistic or theoretical manifestation. The most important aspect of the selection of the three volumes, however, was their affiliation with a horizontal approach to art history, as first theorized by Piotr Piotrowski in 2008, in On the spatial turn, or horizontal art history published in Uměn and then in Toward a Horizontal History of the European Avant-Garde from 2009. The history of horizontal art is defined by Piotrowski in opposition to what he names the history of vertical, “West-centric” art, in which the art world is divided into centre and periphery. In this paradigm, the centre provides “canons, value hierarchies and norms” that the peripheries align to and relate to. As an alternative to this model of looking at and analysing art in Eastern Europe, the author proposes the application of a comparative methodology within the political-geographical construct called Eastern Europe. A horizontal art history means analysing art phenomena in the former Bloc countries in relation to each other, and not in relation to the Western canon, applying the concept of the transnational and not international.
Observator cultural, 2023
Cele trei expoziții inaugurate de Galeria Jecza și Fundația Triade din Timișoara cu ocazia deschi... more Cele trei expoziții inaugurate de Galeria Jecza și Fundația Triade din Timișoara cu ocazia deschiderii oficiale a programului Timișoara 2023 – Capitală Europeană a Culturii au prezentat patru artiști români activi începînd cu anii ’60 (Ritzi și Peter Jacobi), respectiv ’70 (Klára Biró Jecza) și ’80 (Ioan Aurel Mureșan). Expunerea unor opere cu totul noi sau mai puțin cunoscute pentru publicul din România și punctarea prin discursul curatorial a unor aspecte inedite confirmă încă o dată contribuția esențială a acestor două entități culturale la recuperarea unor episoade importante ale istoriei artei românești recente.
https://www.observatorcultural.ro/articol/trairi-stari-rememorari/
Camil Mihăiescu (coord.), Al treilea început... 1990-2020, Editura Universității de Vest, 2020
During its 30 years of continuous activity, the Faculty of Arts and Design from Timișoara has exp... more During its 30 years of continuous activity, the Faculty of Arts and Design from Timișoara has experienced a continuous development by launching new departments and continuously improving the process of learning. Its history coincides with the postcommunist history of Romania, as it was paradigmatimatic in the way in which the vocational higher education has built up it foundation during the uncertain years of transition, and given the way it has consolidated its status in the 2000s and especially after the integration of Romania in the structures of the European Union. Yet the school does not only represent the abstract concept of intuition, it consists of people – professors and students – who have transmitted several characteristics over the years, according to a local spirit. The legacy of art tradition in Timișoara also represented an important aspect needed to define the specifics of the faculty. The first professors teaching in 1990 were the neo-avant-garde artists from Timișoara (Constantin Flondor, Romul Nuțiu, Peter Jecza, Doru Tulcan); among these there were those who practised the experimental pedagogical methods at the Art High-school from Timișoara in the 70s and 80s .
The history of higher art education is marked by three important stages. Between 1933 and 1942 the School of Fine Arts activated in Timișoara, after it was moved from Cluj together with some of the professors among which Romul Ladea, Catul Bogdan and Alexandru Popp. In 1960, the Faculty of Fine Arts was established within the Pedagogical Institute, ending its activity in 1979, when the vocational education was undergoing a period of reorganization, imposed by the communist regime. The painter Aurel Breilean had an important role in founding the institution, he was also the head of department for the vocational disciplines throughout the two decades of activity.
Arta, 2019
Ciprian Radovan made his debut as an artist in the late 1950s. His first solo exhibition was in 1... more Ciprian Radovan made his debut as an artist in the late 1950s. His first solo exhibition was in 1962, and in 1966 he became a member of Romanian Visual Artist's Union. The following years were intensely dedicated to painting. The informal was one of the aspects of Ciprian Radovan's painting to which he returned in a number of clearly-delimited periods during his almost sixty-year-long career.
During the communist regime, photography was a popular activity due to the existence of the Assoc... more During the communist regime, photography was a popular activity due to the existence of the Association of Photographic Artists. Its members weren't professional artists, but mostly people with technical backgrounds, and who transformed their hobby into a job. The lack of interest of Romanian artists in photography (except for a few particular cases such as Ion Grigorescu or Ștefan Bertalan) can be explained by the fact that there were no photo-video departments within the art universities and the Romanian Artists’ Union (UAP), the only form of institutional organization of the Romanian artists, had no special photography department. Therefore, the photographic practice in communist Romania was linked to the Association of Photographic Artists and not to the Romanian Artists’ Union. The evolution of its activity in the period between 1968 and 1978, and the impact that politics had on it transpire very well from the evolution of the Fotografia magazine, the only photo periodical of that era. This article shows that even in a creative field, which was overlooked by the Communist Party, the echoes of the official political discourse were felt, mainly after 1975. We have outlined two aesthetic trends in the mid-1970s. One was the photograph obtained by laboratory procedures, supported by a depoliticized discourse and the second was a pseudo reportage photography, namely the communist propaganda photography.
This paper aims to analyze the most important trends in the post-communist Romanian photography, ... more This paper aims to analyze the most important trends in the post-communist Romanian photography, emphasizing those which are based on a critical dialogue with the inheritance of the dictatorial regime. Recording with a lucid eye the industrial urban landscape or the everyday life of the transitional society, the results of photography practice are an important depository of the collective memory.
Even though during the socialist period, photography was not taken into account very much by Romanian artists, after the fall of the dictatorial regime, in the early 90’s, this medium integrated itself rather quickly in the new artistic discourses, as did other forms of art that had been suppressed before. The first visible reaction of the artistic environment after the release from the censorship was to recuperate very fast the trends that succeeded in the Western art in the last 40 years. In order to harmonize with the European educational system, the four Romanian higher education institutions of fine arts established new photo-video departments. A whole new generation of artists with major interest in photography was emerging.
http://ojs.letras.up.pt/index.php/RL/article/view/1610/1434
The changes in the post-revolutionary Romanian society have had a significant impact on art pract... more The changes in the post-revolutionary Romanian society have had a significant impact on art practices. Within the complex system of essential transformations that have marked the evolution of Romanian art, one of the most interesting directions is that of artistic approaches which incorporate, in a critical manner aspects of the political situation of both before and after December 1989. Communism and its negative legacy, crosses all aspects of Romanian art: from institutional management to art practices. Under such conditions, seeing the institutional climate hardly getting away from previous models, a certain category of progressive artists need to assume the role of challenge and revolt. The strategies by which such missions are fulfilled embrace, in their high majority, forms of non-traditional art: performance, installation, open space intervention and video-art. Starting from Marshall McLuhan‘s statement “the medium is the message” choosing such artistic expression modalities may be interpreted itself as a type of protest. Using the media not accepted before 1989 in an artistic system controlled by the state-party does not only reflect the need of quick recovery, but also the need of radical rupture with the past.
This article discusses the way post-communist Romanian art relates to the events or situation it questions. What are the most frequent topics the Romanian artists, once facing the freedom of expression acquired after the fall of dictatorship, shall approach? How do artistic concepts correlate with artistic languages and where is the significance in choosing certain types of expression?
The first part of the paper offers a short analysis of the institutional context which brought forward challenging art, the art dealing with political and social agenda. This chapter follows the appearance, right after 1990, of the first artistic events independent from the possessive organizing frame of the Artists’ Union. The following chapters offer an analysis of artistic practices and topics they approach in relation to the investigated circumstances.
Expoziția Fiii și fiicele lui Brâncuși. O intrigă de familie (Actul II) realizată de Salonul de p... more Expoziția Fiii și fiicele lui Brâncuși. O intrigă de familie (Actul II) realizată de Salonul de proiecte din București în cadrul Art Encounters propune o abordare ironic-critică asupra transformării lui Brâncuși într-un mit național, prin strategii inadecvate care ajung uneori la limita ridicolului.
Artiștii pun în discuție – nu doar prin lucrările expuse, ci și prin atelierele pe care le susțin periodic– diverse aspecte legate de creația brâncușiană și de modul în care aceasta este percepută atât la nivelul populației de rând, cât și din punct de vedere oficial.
Expoziția grupului timișorean Avantpost a fost concepută ca o formă de dialog între exponatele de... more Expoziția grupului timișorean Avantpost a fost concepută ca o formă de dialog între exponatele deja existente în spațiul Memorialului Revoluției din Timișoara și noile lucrări instalate aici de către artiștii acestui grup. Fără intenția de a fi invazive, aceste intervenții reprezintă mai degrabă o augmentare a materialului documentar prezent aici.
Prin abordarea unei vaste serii de problematici referitoare la istoria recentă, la comunism și postcomunism, la aspecte politice punctuale sau la principii și idei, conceptul general devine complex și închegat.
Dincolo de Cortina de Fier. Festivalul Zona Europa de Est este o expoziție cu caracter documentar... more Dincolo de Cortina de Fier. Festivalul Zona Europa de Est este o expoziție cu caracter documentar, care oferă o amplă viziune asupra celui mai important festival de performance din România. Intenția curatorului Ileana Pintilie este aceea de a evidenția tocmai integrarea fenomenului performance art din România într-un context geo-politic mai larg.
Performance-urile prezentate au variat între gesturi dramatice, acţiuni cu regie elaborată, recurgerea la instalaţionism ca bază a acţiunii, video performance sau conceptualism.
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Call for papers by Maria Orosan Telea
Conference ART, MEMORY AND IDENTITY
Faculty of Arts and Design, West University of Timisoara, Romania, 10th – 11th of April 2019
The Faculty of Arts and Design, West University of Timisoara, welcomes proposals for the 2019 Conference in the field of the history and theory of arts, which will be held in Timisoara in April 10-11. The conference is dedicated to ”Art, memory and identity” and is open to scholars and PhD candidates in history and theory of art, anthropology of art, philosophy, and visual artists.
During the history, social, religious and political programs and ideologies benefited from the capacity of arts to convey important messages directly to the minds and hearts of the people. From commissioned portraits of powerful people to memorials and triumph arches, visual arts participated in remembering the past, in spreading values and ideas, in creating lineages and identities. In the contemporary world, artists often demonstrate the aspiration to participate into the society (re)construction, and their voices become more and more critical of the well established institutions, state-sanctioned collective memory or official versions of the past.
The Conference aims to explore the connections between art, memory and identity, to examine how artists deal, deliberately or not, with the collective past and present. From papers that investigate how social memory impacts on artistic creation to works focusing on how art contributes to (re)shaping a common identity, theoretical perspectives and applied research are equally welcome. While contributions on any type of artwork will be considered, public art is a focus of the conference.
The Conference languages are English and Romanian.
DEADLINE
Please send a short presentation and an abstract of no more than 300 words to [email protected] and [email protected]. The deadline for proposal submission is February 1, 2019. Authors invited to attend the conference will be notified by 20th of February.
EXPENSES
There is no conference fee.
Limited financial assistance is available for travel costs reimbursement. The request for travel support must be submitted with the proposal.
Accommodation will be provided subject to availability.
Books by Maria Orosan Telea
ongoing art projects, ideas and experiments, partially completed
projects or larger-scale replicable samples. Conceptualization, research
and analysis are the key points in identifying the appropriate format
for their presentation. Exhibiting ideas or art works at intermediate
stage questions the vague boundaries between the creative process and
the definitive work. The aim is to make a frame stop in an ongoing
conceptual structure.
Interaction with the public becomes a generative premise and can
have a determined role in increasing or changing the trajectory of the
future project. Our desire is to create a context of contiguity and free
discussion, in which the transmitter and receiver constantly change
their roles.
Ghidul conține un scurt istoric al ultimilor decenii din arta românească, liste de artiști, câteva lucrări prezentate și explicate, un glosar de termeni, o selecție – românească și internațională – de muzee, galerii, evenimente de artă, colecționari, case de licitații, câteva indicii privind modul de funcționare a pieței de artă, o listă de surse de informare suplimentare. Toate acestea sunt instrumente de bază, care să conducă cititorul spre propriile concluzii.
Ceea ce încercăm să transmitem este că arta contemporană merită să fie descoperită fără prejudecăți, cu simpla dorință de a proiecta propriile înțelesuri asupra lucrărilor propuse de artiști.
Articles by Maria Orosan Telea
The three volumes this study refers to are: Piotr Piotrowski, Art and Democracy in Post-Communist Europe (2010), Klara Kemp-Welch, Networking the Bloc: Experimental Art in Eastern Europe 1965-1981 (2018) and Maja and Reuben Fowkes, Central and Eastern European Art Since 1950 (2020). One of the criteria for selecting these books is the fact that they are all books written by one author, and not collective volumes with polyphonic voices. Also, the common feature of the three volumes lies in their positioning in the sphere of academic research, with a general and comparative view of the region, even if from case to case some countries are privileged over others. Thus, we have excluded volumes, whether single-authored or collective, that nuance the research and deal only with a particular type of artistic or theoretical manifestation. The most important aspect of the selection of the three volumes, however, was their affiliation with a horizontal approach to art history, as first theorized by Piotr Piotrowski in 2008, in On the spatial turn, or horizontal art history published in Uměn and then in Toward a Horizontal History of the European Avant-Garde from 2009. The history of horizontal art is defined by Piotrowski in opposition to what he names the history of vertical, “West-centric” art, in which the art world is divided into centre and periphery. In this paradigm, the centre provides “canons, value hierarchies and norms” that the peripheries align to and relate to. As an alternative to this model of looking at and analysing art in Eastern Europe, the author proposes the application of a comparative methodology within the political-geographical construct called Eastern Europe. A horizontal art history means analysing art phenomena in the former Bloc countries in relation to each other, and not in relation to the Western canon, applying the concept of the transnational and not international.
Dacă mi-aș propune să cuprind într-un cuvânt proiectul Desene în Aer Liber realizat de artistul clujean Radu Cioca în perioada rezidenței din vara anului 2021 în satul Cecălaca din județul Mureș, m-aș opri la termenul “intersecție”. De fapt, proiectul produce multiple forme de întâlnire, nu doar o singură intersecție.
https://www.observatorcultural.ro/articol/trairi-stari-rememorari/
The history of higher art education is marked by three important stages. Between 1933 and 1942 the School of Fine Arts activated in Timișoara, after it was moved from Cluj together with some of the professors among which Romul Ladea, Catul Bogdan and Alexandru Popp. In 1960, the Faculty of Fine Arts was established within the Pedagogical Institute, ending its activity in 1979, when the vocational education was undergoing a period of reorganization, imposed by the communist regime. The painter Aurel Breilean had an important role in founding the institution, he was also the head of department for the vocational disciplines throughout the two decades of activity.
Even though during the socialist period, photography was not taken into account very much by Romanian artists, after the fall of the dictatorial regime, in the early 90’s, this medium integrated itself rather quickly in the new artistic discourses, as did other forms of art that had been suppressed before. The first visible reaction of the artistic environment after the release from the censorship was to recuperate very fast the trends that succeeded in the Western art in the last 40 years. In order to harmonize with the European educational system, the four Romanian higher education institutions of fine arts established new photo-video departments. A whole new generation of artists with major interest in photography was emerging.
http://ojs.letras.up.pt/index.php/RL/article/view/1610/1434
This article discusses the way post-communist Romanian art relates to the events or situation it questions. What are the most frequent topics the Romanian artists, once facing the freedom of expression acquired after the fall of dictatorship, shall approach? How do artistic concepts correlate with artistic languages and where is the significance in choosing certain types of expression?
The first part of the paper offers a short analysis of the institutional context which brought forward challenging art, the art dealing with political and social agenda. This chapter follows the appearance, right after 1990, of the first artistic events independent from the possessive organizing frame of the Artists’ Union. The following chapters offer an analysis of artistic practices and topics they approach in relation to the investigated circumstances.
Artiștii pun în discuție – nu doar prin lucrările expuse, ci și prin atelierele pe care le susțin periodic– diverse aspecte legate de creația brâncușiană și de modul în care aceasta este percepută atât la nivelul populației de rând, cât și din punct de vedere oficial.
Prin abordarea unei vaste serii de problematici referitoare la istoria recentă, la comunism și postcomunism, la aspecte politice punctuale sau la principii și idei, conceptul general devine complex și închegat.
Performance-urile prezentate au variat între gesturi dramatice, acţiuni cu regie elaborată, recurgerea la instalaţionism ca bază a acţiunii, video performance sau conceptualism.
Conference ART, MEMORY AND IDENTITY
Faculty of Arts and Design, West University of Timisoara, Romania, 10th – 11th of April 2019
The Faculty of Arts and Design, West University of Timisoara, welcomes proposals for the 2019 Conference in the field of the history and theory of arts, which will be held in Timisoara in April 10-11. The conference is dedicated to ”Art, memory and identity” and is open to scholars and PhD candidates in history and theory of art, anthropology of art, philosophy, and visual artists.
During the history, social, religious and political programs and ideologies benefited from the capacity of arts to convey important messages directly to the minds and hearts of the people. From commissioned portraits of powerful people to memorials and triumph arches, visual arts participated in remembering the past, in spreading values and ideas, in creating lineages and identities. In the contemporary world, artists often demonstrate the aspiration to participate into the society (re)construction, and their voices become more and more critical of the well established institutions, state-sanctioned collective memory or official versions of the past.
The Conference aims to explore the connections between art, memory and identity, to examine how artists deal, deliberately or not, with the collective past and present. From papers that investigate how social memory impacts on artistic creation to works focusing on how art contributes to (re)shaping a common identity, theoretical perspectives and applied research are equally welcome. While contributions on any type of artwork will be considered, public art is a focus of the conference.
The Conference languages are English and Romanian.
DEADLINE
Please send a short presentation and an abstract of no more than 300 words to [email protected] and [email protected]. The deadline for proposal submission is February 1, 2019. Authors invited to attend the conference will be notified by 20th of February.
EXPENSES
There is no conference fee.
Limited financial assistance is available for travel costs reimbursement. The request for travel support must be submitted with the proposal.
Accommodation will be provided subject to availability.
ongoing art projects, ideas and experiments, partially completed
projects or larger-scale replicable samples. Conceptualization, research
and analysis are the key points in identifying the appropriate format
for their presentation. Exhibiting ideas or art works at intermediate
stage questions the vague boundaries between the creative process and
the definitive work. The aim is to make a frame stop in an ongoing
conceptual structure.
Interaction with the public becomes a generative premise and can
have a determined role in increasing or changing the trajectory of the
future project. Our desire is to create a context of contiguity and free
discussion, in which the transmitter and receiver constantly change
their roles.
Ghidul conține un scurt istoric al ultimilor decenii din arta românească, liste de artiști, câteva lucrări prezentate și explicate, un glosar de termeni, o selecție – românească și internațională – de muzee, galerii, evenimente de artă, colecționari, case de licitații, câteva indicii privind modul de funcționare a pieței de artă, o listă de surse de informare suplimentare. Toate acestea sunt instrumente de bază, care să conducă cititorul spre propriile concluzii.
Ceea ce încercăm să transmitem este că arta contemporană merită să fie descoperită fără prejudecăți, cu simpla dorință de a proiecta propriile înțelesuri asupra lucrărilor propuse de artiști.
The three volumes this study refers to are: Piotr Piotrowski, Art and Democracy in Post-Communist Europe (2010), Klara Kemp-Welch, Networking the Bloc: Experimental Art in Eastern Europe 1965-1981 (2018) and Maja and Reuben Fowkes, Central and Eastern European Art Since 1950 (2020). One of the criteria for selecting these books is the fact that they are all books written by one author, and not collective volumes with polyphonic voices. Also, the common feature of the three volumes lies in their positioning in the sphere of academic research, with a general and comparative view of the region, even if from case to case some countries are privileged over others. Thus, we have excluded volumes, whether single-authored or collective, that nuance the research and deal only with a particular type of artistic or theoretical manifestation. The most important aspect of the selection of the three volumes, however, was their affiliation with a horizontal approach to art history, as first theorized by Piotr Piotrowski in 2008, in On the spatial turn, or horizontal art history published in Uměn and then in Toward a Horizontal History of the European Avant-Garde from 2009. The history of horizontal art is defined by Piotrowski in opposition to what he names the history of vertical, “West-centric” art, in which the art world is divided into centre and periphery. In this paradigm, the centre provides “canons, value hierarchies and norms” that the peripheries align to and relate to. As an alternative to this model of looking at and analysing art in Eastern Europe, the author proposes the application of a comparative methodology within the political-geographical construct called Eastern Europe. A horizontal art history means analysing art phenomena in the former Bloc countries in relation to each other, and not in relation to the Western canon, applying the concept of the transnational and not international.
Dacă mi-aș propune să cuprind într-un cuvânt proiectul Desene în Aer Liber realizat de artistul clujean Radu Cioca în perioada rezidenței din vara anului 2021 în satul Cecălaca din județul Mureș, m-aș opri la termenul “intersecție”. De fapt, proiectul produce multiple forme de întâlnire, nu doar o singură intersecție.
https://www.observatorcultural.ro/articol/trairi-stari-rememorari/
The history of higher art education is marked by three important stages. Between 1933 and 1942 the School of Fine Arts activated in Timișoara, after it was moved from Cluj together with some of the professors among which Romul Ladea, Catul Bogdan and Alexandru Popp. In 1960, the Faculty of Fine Arts was established within the Pedagogical Institute, ending its activity in 1979, when the vocational education was undergoing a period of reorganization, imposed by the communist regime. The painter Aurel Breilean had an important role in founding the institution, he was also the head of department for the vocational disciplines throughout the two decades of activity.
Even though during the socialist period, photography was not taken into account very much by Romanian artists, after the fall of the dictatorial regime, in the early 90’s, this medium integrated itself rather quickly in the new artistic discourses, as did other forms of art that had been suppressed before. The first visible reaction of the artistic environment after the release from the censorship was to recuperate very fast the trends that succeeded in the Western art in the last 40 years. In order to harmonize with the European educational system, the four Romanian higher education institutions of fine arts established new photo-video departments. A whole new generation of artists with major interest in photography was emerging.
http://ojs.letras.up.pt/index.php/RL/article/view/1610/1434
This article discusses the way post-communist Romanian art relates to the events or situation it questions. What are the most frequent topics the Romanian artists, once facing the freedom of expression acquired after the fall of dictatorship, shall approach? How do artistic concepts correlate with artistic languages and where is the significance in choosing certain types of expression?
The first part of the paper offers a short analysis of the institutional context which brought forward challenging art, the art dealing with political and social agenda. This chapter follows the appearance, right after 1990, of the first artistic events independent from the possessive organizing frame of the Artists’ Union. The following chapters offer an analysis of artistic practices and topics they approach in relation to the investigated circumstances.
Artiștii pun în discuție – nu doar prin lucrările expuse, ci și prin atelierele pe care le susțin periodic– diverse aspecte legate de creația brâncușiană și de modul în care aceasta este percepută atât la nivelul populației de rând, cât și din punct de vedere oficial.
Prin abordarea unei vaste serii de problematici referitoare la istoria recentă, la comunism și postcomunism, la aspecte politice punctuale sau la principii și idei, conceptul general devine complex și închegat.
Performance-urile prezentate au variat între gesturi dramatice, acţiuni cu regie elaborată, recurgerea la instalaţionism ca bază a acţiunii, video performance sau conceptualism.
Adriana Jebeleanu and Marina Albu are two artists of the younger generation working with performance art in order to express much deeper meanings on human existence, on one’s relationship with oneself or with others. Even though their manners of acting are different, both are interested in analyzing the various stages of life and its end.
Key words: relational aesthetics, contemporaneity, post-communism, conceptual art
The Memorial of the Revolution was established in Timișoara in 1990, a year after the events that led to the fall of Ceausescu's regime. The museum collection includes objects, documents, photographs, video recordings, press reports and personal testimonies. The institution preserves the memory of the recent past of Romania in a very authentic way. The exhibitions spaces are dedicated to the chronology of the events of 1989 recalled thought photography and publication, to objects belonging to the victims and oppressors, to miniature copies of the commemorative monuments put up in Timişoara etc.
Occasionally the Memorial of the Revolution is hosting temporary art exhibition. Becoming Connected was an site-specific exhibition of the Avantpost group opened during October 2015. It was conceived as a dialogue between the already existing exhibits in the space of the Memorial and the new works installed here by the artists. Without the intention of being invasive, these interventions were rather an augmentation of the documentary material present here. The general concept was very complex by addressing a wide range of issues related to recent history, to communism and post-communism, to punctual political issues or to general ideology principles and ideas. Establishing a direct connection with a collective memory space places the Avantpost exhibition in a particular position among the exhibitions that have taken place over time in the Memorial.
Event Date: 27-28 septembrie 2013
Organization: Conferinţa de Estetică şi Teorii ale artelor
Beral Madra is a Turkish art critic and curator. She was curator of the two first editions of the Istanbul Biennial (1987 and 1989), and has curated five of the Turkish pavilions at the Venice Biennale. Her curatorial career also includes several international group shows, among them: Orient Express (Berlin, 1994), Modernities and Memories: Recent Works from the Islamic World (Venice, 1998), Registering the Distance: Istanbul/Los Angeles (Santa Monica, 2003), Next Wave: Exhibition of 17 Women Artists from Turkey” (Berlin, 2009). Madra was co-curator, along with Răzvan Ion, of the 2018 edition of the Bucharest Biennale, titled Edit Your Future, which ran from May 17 to July 8, 2018. I met Madra this spring in Romania to discuss contemporary art and politics in Turkey, alongside the trajectory of her important career as an international curator.
LILIANA MERCIOIU POPA // RASTISLAV ŠKULEC,
NICOLAE VELCIOV // MILOŠ VUJANOVIĆ
Text by Maria Orosan-Telea, curator
The Art Dialogue Timișoara/Novi Sad Exhibition was initiated as an encounter of art discourses dealing whit the human’s condition in nowadays society, but it turned to be more than a show displaying artworks in order to discuss an idea. The general topic of this festival’s edition, The Use of Man, lead to the curatorial selection of six artists, tree from Timișoara and the other tree from Novi Sad, whose interests are highly relevant, addressing socio-political issues, ecology, the impact of technology, housing and daily life, the biological and spiritual condition of humans.
Defining the perpetually shifting trends of art in the present can often lead to contradictory arguments, and thus there are few bold and risky examples of efforts at historicizing artistic phenomena that are still in the course of development. At the same time, however, there seems to be an urgency to facilitating the entrance of very recent art from the countries of the former Eastern bloc into the global consciousness. This is happening not only through exhibitions, which have gradually but significantly been increasing in number in the decades after 1989,(1) but also through consistent publications. For example, in the past 20 years such volumes have been dedicated to the artistic scene of Croatia, Poland, Serbia, Slovakia, or Bulgaria,(2) through the contribution of art historians and curators from these countries. There are two problems that can arise in the case of such publications. One is the subjective perspective due to the short time that has passed since the period in which a certain artistic phenomenon took place. The second is sometimes linked to the support coming from influential galleries and foundations, which casts suspicion on the books as promotional publications.