A World Has Still To Be Built

Artists: Silvia Amancei & Bogdan Armanu, Apparatus 22, Alex Bodea, Brassaï, Geta Brătescu, Mircea Cantor, Simion Cernica, Teodor Graur, Dan Mihălțianu, Alex Mirutziu, Nita Mocanu, Ciprian Mureșan, Ioana Nemeș, Andrei Pandele, Dan Perjovschi, Lea Rasovszky, Daniel Spoerri, Andra Ursuța, Gabriela Vanga.
Curator: Diana Marincu

29th September 2018 – 23rd November 2018
Opening: 29th September 2018
Art Encounters Foundation, 46C Take Ionescu Blvd. (Casa ISHO), Timișoara

The world has never stopped building and rebuilding itself and the expectation to deliver a better, a fairer or merely a more bearable future is always returning as a yearning of the process of situating oneself in time and space. What happens after something falls apart, how do you rebuild a system, and what is the consequence of collective and individual redefining?

The reading of the title, which is an excerpt from W.G. Auden’s 1962 Prologue: The Birth of Architecture, can be enriched with larger snippets from Auden’s text: It’s our turn now / to puzzle the unborn. No world / wears as well as it should but, mortal or not, / a world has still to be built. What is not yet visible, known, what is on the threshold between what has been and what will be, can be grasped as an intensified shape of the present, a task of the present time and a responsibility of knowledge.

The exhibition on display starts from questions and proposals coined by the invited artists in relation to an unstable and antagonistic socio-political climate, ever more trapped in its own cyclic system of revolt and obedience. The islands of knowledge that art lay bare group themselves here in solid territories, defined by the direct experience of a context the artists confront. They react to social drives, collective revolt, and personal discontents by drawing out the language of revolt and reworking it into an abrasive poetic vocabulary apt to foretell the zeitgeist. Whether we are talking of irony, reenactment, collective actions or individual gestures, the strategies the artists employ outline different ways of reading and contesting reality at the time of its breakdown and recreation.