Learning Together: Practicing Cultural Mediation Today
The Art Encounters Foundation & PRAKSIS invites you on Friday, December 15, starting at 10:00, to the conference “Learning Together: Practicing Cultural Mediation Today”.
The event will take place at our foundation in Blvd. Take Ionescu 46C, ISHO House, 1st floor, in the setting provided by the exhibition dedicated to the late contemporary artist Ioana Nemeș.
Entry is free, and discussions will be held in English.
Cultural mediation is not a given but a theoretical construct describing practices and systems, patterns of action, and training. It is a specific approach concerning certain social and cultural issues, which we also want to focus on through particular projects and visions that our special guests will discuss. We thus propose an event that combines theory with specific mediation practices and offers several possible answers to current developments.
The conference program is structured as follows: 10:00 – Introductory words with Diana Marincu, the artistic director of the Art Encounters Foundation; 10:30 – Online presentation entitled “From inside the art museum – New education practices and new research” by Line Engen (Norway) 10:45 – Online presentation given by Anna Kerekes (France) 11:00 – Q&A session 12:00 – Break 13:30 – 15:30: Round table with in the company of guests Mihaela Tilincă, Corina Bucea, Andreea Iager-TakoMaria Orosan-Telea, Nicholas John Jones, artistic director of PRAKSIS, and Kristian Schrøder, programme manager at PRAKSIS; (moderator: Marius Stan).
Line Engen (b. 1975) is a researcher and author. She has a major in art history from the University of Oslo and works as an education curator at the National Museum in Oslo. She heads the museum education section of the Norwegian museum association and has edited two international anthologies on education and research.
Mihaela “Miha” Tilincă b. 1961 is an educator and cultural mediator based in Timisoara, involved in the development of projects in culture and education, in training and mentoring a new generation of cultural mediators and in the democratization of society through cultural instruments. Over the last twenty-five years she has developed and implemented projects and exercised cultural mediation in different roles for the British Council, Contrasens Cultural Association, Civicultura, Politehnica University Timișoara. She graduated from the University of West Timisoara (1984) and has a PhD in Discourse Analysis and Literacy from the University of Lancaster (2007).
Corina Bucea is a cultural manager with experience in project coordination, artistic production, cultural policies, and cultural mediation. She was one of the founding members of the contemporary art space Fabrica de Pensule (2009), where she worked as a manager in the first years of activity. She coordinated or collaborated with various projects representing Romania at the Venice Biennale of Art and Architecture (2013, 2015, 2016, 2017, 2022). Starting in 2018, she coordinated the Change Academy within the Cluj Cultural Center, a program dedicated to increasing the capacity of the cultural sector. Between 2021 and 2023, she was part of the Timișoara 2023 – European Capital of Culture’s curatorial team as an education and mediation & Power Station strategy expert.
Andreea Iager Tako is passionate about discovering people, ideas, projects, and connecting them all into models that change communities by developing impactful solutions. Exposed to artistic productions and travel from a young age, she has independently developed methods to appreciate diversity in all its forms, while staying at home in Timisoara. She studied psychology and sustainable development, worked in marketing and human resources before dedicating herself full-time to the community work. She is a co-founder of the PLAI Festival, supports the PLAI productions, co-founded AMBASADA, its extension of building.a.community and most recently, co-founded FABER – alongside Cristina and Val Muresan, Adrian Erimescu, and the FOR team. During the pandemic, she also founded a social enterprise – ONE.shirt – an endeavor in slow fashion that speaks about social inclusion and draws attention to the pollution of the textile industry and clothing waste.
Maria Orosan-Telea works as a university lecturer at the Faculty of Arts and Design from Timișoara. She studied art history and theory at Babeș-Bolyai University in Cluj-Napoca. She has been interested in contemporary art since her doctoral studies when she researched Romanian art from the post-communist period. Her collaboration with the Art Encounters Foundation began in 2017 with the publication of the “Art Guide. Introduction to Romanian contemporary art” book. As a curator, she conducted a series of projects in collaboration with the Avantpost group, and in 2018, she founded the curatorial program DRAFT. Between 2019 and 2021, she was an assistant in the project “Gender Politics and the Art of European Socialist States” initiated by the Adam Mickiewicz University in Poznań. Adjacent to academic and curatorial activities, she is concerned with developing friendly methods for familiarizing the public with notions and trends in art history.
Established in 2015, PRAKSIS is a non-profit centre for art, research, and learning in Oslo. PRAKSIS’s programs foreground collective activity and the exchange of ideas, skills, and information, generating a dialogue between artists, thinkers, and organisations locally and internationally, at all career stages, and across diverse cultures and disciplines. PRAKSIS collaborates with partners to place its activities within the broadest possible contexts. Since its founding in 2015, it has worked with over sixty partners ranging from national museums, universities, and leading art centres to wrestling clubs. Its core activities include: Organizing and running artists’ residencies; Staging public events; Youth programming; Online and in-print publishing;
Established in 2015, the Art Encounters Foundation aims to deliver an institutional model tailored to the needs of the local context and which is equally engaged in contributing to the international art scene. Founded by art collector and entrepreneur based in Timișoara Ovidiu Șandor, the Art Encounters Foundation is an initiative aiming to enrich and support the development of the contemporary art scene in Romania. Its core mission is to foster dialogue, learning, research, and experiment. The Foundation’s activities are carried out over the following main directions: organizing the Art Encounters Biennial in Timișoara and the exhibition program taking place at its permanent space in Timișoara or other sites; fostering education and audience development through public programs; developing a solid series of artistic and curatorial residencies. In conjunction with the permanent programs of the Foundation, the private art collection of Ovidiu Șandor, president of the Art Encounters Foundation, functions as an open resource for exhibitions, institutional collaboration, and research. ___ The project “Intersections – Art, Knowledge and Society” benefits from a grant for 63. 010 euro from Iceland, Liechtenstein, and Norway through the EEA and the Norwegian Funds.
