Viața – mod de întrebuințare / Life a User’s Manual
Art Encounters Biennial Catalogue 2017
Editor: Ana Toma
Authors: Ami Barak and Diana Marincu
Invited authors: Mara Ambrožič, Bogdan Ghiu, Flavia Goian
Language: Romanian / English
Publishing Date: September 2017
Publisher: Art Encounters Foundation
Format: Paperback | 264 pages
ISBN: 9786069395783
Dimensions: H: 30cm | l: 20cm
For the second edition of the Art Encounters Biennial 2017, the curators Ami Barak and Diana Marincu aimed to investigate and chronicle fragments of everyday reality, as reflected in artistic explorations, both present and past. The exhibitions tracked the ways the contemporary artists face the immediate reality that has become increasingly unstable. Inspired by the novel of Georges Perec La vie mode d’emploi [Life a User’s Manual], which gave the title of the main theme of the event, the biennial presented fragments, characters and situations, daily and life stories.
Facing the inextricable incoherence of life, the artists look for solutions and propose ways of understanding by the means of questions, metaphors, and symbols, that make us realize that, as the Fluxus artist Robert Filiou put it, “Art is what makes life more interesting than art”. Together, the different planes on which what we call everyday life evolves form a palimpsest of information, emotions, and actions processed by the artists. The diversity of these narrations resides in the various manners of adapting, personalizing, and confronting the norms – imposed or self-imposed – of the public and private life.
Art Encounters 2017 took place in Timișoara and Arad between 30 September – 5 November 2017. The event attempted to become a dynamic apparatus that would enable the contemporary visual culture and the Romanian art scene to highlight the challenges and the weak points, but also the aspirations and the strongholds on which the future of contemporary art builds itself at an accelerated pace. The polyphony of the presented voices and artistic discourses acted as stimuli for the negotiation of a common ground for meeting and dialogue between various institutions and independent initiatives from Romania, playing an important part in building relevant working models for the local artistic and social context. At a regional level, Art Encounters 2017 intended to foster a dialogue with the Serbian and Hungarian art scene and to start a debate over the problems faced by the independent initiatives and the existing institutions, the discontinuities of the recent history and the construction of the present artistic system.
Anturaju’ and Other Stories / Anturaju’ și alte întâmplări
Călin Dan
Language: Romanian
Publication Date: 2016
Publisher: Art Encounters Foundation
Format: Paperback | 56 pages
ISBN: 2000000705026
Dimensions: H: 21cm | L: 14.5cm
Călin Dan has been invited by the Office of Netherland’s Chief Architect in 2005 to coordinate a pilot-project of artistic education in a maximum-security prison in Romania. The project was developed between 2006-2008, resulting in a show: Carne/Cane. The city is ours, performed by a group of inmates at Odeon Theatre in Bucharest. The interviews made in the initial phase of the project have been presented in the Anturaju’ and Other Stories exhibition (National Museum of Contemporary Art – MNAC Bucharest, 2010), together with the movie Wings for Dogs, inspired by the same context.
The book was published for the first edition of Timișoara Art Encounters Biennial – TAE (October 2015), along with a mono-screen presentation of Anturaju’ interviews, as part of an exhibition curated by Nathalie Hoyos and Rainald Schumacher.
Aparență și esență / Appearance and Essence
Art Encounters Biennial Catalogue 2015
Authors: Nathalie Hoyos and Rainald Schumacher
Invited authors: Cătălin Gheorghe, Erwin Kessler, Diana Marincu
Language: Romanian / English
Publishing Date: 2015
Publisher: Art Encounters Foundation
Format: Paperback | 170 pages
ISBN: 9786069395721
Dimensions: H: 30 cm | l: 20cm
The first edition of the Art Encounters Biennial focused on artists belonging to the Romanian culture, linked to it either by their birthplace, language, or artistic references – artists who live and work in Romania or elsewhere. The curators Nathalie Hoyos and Rainald Schumacher adopted an archaeological point of view, using an outsider approach to search for essential denominators, but also to try to highlight the immanent content. Appearance & Essence were the curatorial landmarks for mapping the Romanian artistic scene. It was not the curators’ intention to find some hidden national identity, more rather the cultural differences, the individual nuances distinguishable in the global discourse.
Art Encounters 2015 concentrated therefore on a specific chapter of the multilayered narration of the contemporary art, spotlighting the Romanian art starting from the ‘60s to the present days and following some of its inherent stories. The history of visual art is revealed through the artworks of the past and the artistic life of the present. The artworks are manifestations of thought and reason, but also of the affective relationship with reality and the social environment. The history of art transforms these kinds of manifestations into language and theory, incorporating them into the historical context. Over the last ten years, the history of Western art has been going through a process of constant rewriting and recontextualizing. Its unilateral interpretation based on the logic of the Western Europe and North America evolution has been supplemented and altered by numerous parallel narrations coming from the multitude of cultural spheres. As an important part in the recent global approach of coexisting cultural narrations, the Eastern Europe is being rediscovered and reassessed, especially after the fall of the Iron Curtain.
Photography in the Circulatory System: I started with painting and I have never moved away from it
Ion Grigorescu
Language: English
Publication Date: 2015
Publisher: Art Encounters Foundation
Format: Hardcover | 80 pages
ISBN: 9786069395707
Dimensions: H: 15cm | L: 42.5cm
Photography in the Circulatory System is an artist book by Ion Grigorescu, based on the exhibition with the same title, curated by the artist and organised by Andreiana Mihail Gallery at City Business Centre Timișoara between November 2013 — January 2014. In the album, the reader will find a consistent thematic and historical selection of photographical works spanning from the ’70s.
“(…) The circulatory system processes 20 liters of blood per day through capillary filtration, which removes plasma while leaving the blood cells. Approximately 17 litres of the filtered plasma are reabsorbed directly into the blood vessels, while the remaining 3 litres remain in the interstitial fluid. The primary function of the lymphatic system is to provide a route by which these excess 3 litres per day can be returned to the blood. The same thing takes place in developing trays – the liquid that produces images gradually decreases, the contrast blurs, and the exposure time increases. The photographer is processing photography.” (2013)
Book concept, selection of photographs, texts and layout by Ion Grigorescu.
Exhibition organised and book published with the kind support of Ovidiu Șandor.
Published by the Art Encounters Foundation.
Edition with 200 copies