14 November 17h00

FEMINIST ART IN MEXICO: A PERSONAL JOURNEY

Is feminist art relevant in today's globalized world?

Monica Mayer will share her experiences as a feminist artist over the past thirty years and discuss the social, political and aesthetic issues that have interested different generations of women artists. Monica Mayer is present in Romania by the courtesy of the Embassy of Mexico in Romania, for Perspective 2008 project, curator Olivia Niţiş.

Mónica Mayer (Mexico City, 1954), studied visual arts at the Escuela Nacional de Artes Plásticas in Mexico City and in 1980 obtained a masters degree in sociology of art at Goddard College while participating at the Feminist Studio Workshop in Los Angeles, California.

A major area of Mayer’s work has been performance art. In 1983 she formed Polvo de Gallina Negra, the first feminist art group in Mexico with Maris Bustamante. The group presented performances in the media and different social interventions. Mayer also formed the group Tlacuilas y Retrateras, another feminist art group integrated by the participants in a two year workshop she gave to artists and art historians. Mayer has also performed on her own or with Victor Lerma in different festivals in Mexico and Japan, as well as presenting her work in museums. However, most of her performance pieces are social interventions designed specifically for each place and situation. Since 1989 she has participated in Pinto mi Raya with Victor Lerma, which is an on-going piece on the Mexican art system (www.pintomiraya.com.mx). She is co-director of the Pinto mi Raya archive, which specializes in contemporary Mexican art.

Opening: Thursday, 16 October 19h00

WHILE YOU WERE SLEEPING

16-31 October 2008

Artists: Lavinia German, Alex Grigoras, Bogdan Vatavu/ Andrea Hajtajer/ Dumitru Oboroc/ Mihai Verestiuc

Curator: Cristian Nae

A project run by the Studio for art practices and debates (coordinated by Catalin Gheorghe & Cristian Nae)

Assuming a puzzling impossibility of recording recent history, the exhibition takes as a starting point the erosion of the historical speech inscribed within public icons and effigies, constituted at the crossroad of fragmentary narratives and empty rhetorical speeches which legitimate them, denying the possibility of their solid coagulation. They facilitate critical numbness and constantly reproduce forgeries of public values seemingly erected overnight.

Playfully mimicking the masks of borrowed formal identities, the works in the show assume the possibility of exercising criticism by temporary appropriation, simulation and redistribution of conventional signs of power. Their common discursive practice lies in reinterpreting “monumentality” as sculptural embodiment of transience, imprecision and contingency. They stimulate conflicting aesthetics and critically use their symbolic potentiality. Ironically approached in its political and ideological function, the monument, understood as the name of the economy of public values and sign of persistence and durability, is transformed into a performative element of the proposed scenario, being often twisted on the verge of critical parody.

Referring in particular to the expectancies towards the stakes of contemporary public sculpture, the exhibition’s discourse aims to perform a temporary artistic intervention on the socio-political Romanian present-day representations, by constantly theatrically staging their own situation, caught between uncertain future projections, ideological heritage and blurred present-day public identities. (Cristian Nae)

The studio for art practices and debates is an educational platform for critical research and art production run by Vector Association in collaboration with the Research Center organized within the Faculty of Fine Arts, Decorative Arts and Design, Iasi.

INTERVENTIONS3

artistic interventions in public space

public presentation

October 10, 2008 | 4 pm

a project by Oberliht Association

– film projection

– presentation of the catalogue

– launch of 7th issue of STATE of EMERGENCY magazine/Oberliht Supplement

– debates with project participants

Project director, curator – Vladimir US

Co-curator – Nataša BODROZIC

The INTERVENTIONS3, artistic project dealing with public space took place in the city of Chisinau’s and its surroundings throughout August this year. The project gathered more than thirty participants from Moldova, Romania, Croatia, Germany and France who stayed in the city for a short term residency creating art works and reflecting over the processes producing Chisinau’s public space today, the city's visual structure, the memory and experience of its inhabitants' everyday life.

Their stay is documented in the catalogue, in two different issues of STATE of EMERGENCY magazine / Oberliht Supplement and in a film that is going to be shown on this occasion.

http://www.oberliht.org.md/interventii3.html

Opening: Monday 22 Sept. 2008, 18h00
TEMPS D'IMAGES
22-30/09/08
Exhibition of video works created by graduates of Romanian art universities
curated by Oana Tanase & Thomas Ciulei

organised by Artlink Cultural Association

UNAgaleria is closed for the duration of the summer holiday.
We look forward to your visit in September!

27 June 2008
The White Night of Cultural Institutes
program proposed by the Goethe Institute Bucharest

MOLDOVA CAMPING

Timeline:

18h00 Film making in the Republic of Moldova – short presentation by Dumitru Marian (production director at OWH TV Studio)

19h00 Tent event with Pavel Braila – performance by video artist Pavel Braila (Chisinau/Berlin)

20h00 Generation Chisinau – the perspectives of film making in Moldova (this program has also been presented aty the Berlin Film Festival – balkan black box film, art, and culture in South-Eastern Europe)

- documentary: San Sanych / San Sanych
Director: George Agadjanean, 59 min, English subtitles, Moldova 2006
(DOK Leipzig 2006, Cottbus 2006, Jilava Festival 2007, Cronograf 2007)

- short movies:

Dying for Madrid

Director: Igor Cobileanski, 22 min, English subtitles, Moldova 1998

Cind se stinge lumina / When the Lights go out

Director: Igor Cobileanski, 8:20 min, English subtitles, Moldova 2006

MOLD_GOLIA, 60 min., English subtitles, Moldova (project in progress), Curator: Stefan Rusu (KSA:K, Chisinau)

16-20 June 2008 / Opening: Monday 16 June 19h00

Alina Popa & Irina Gheorghe

Poto&Cabengo

Work in progress

„Poto and Cabengo are two twins from South California who refuse to communicate with the people around them and invent a language of their own. The director Jean-Pierre Gorin makes in 1979 a documentary about them; the twins are eventually normalized through a learning process which deprives them not only of their imagination, but also of the fascination they had on the others.

This story was the starting point of a photographic investigation about the I-you relation which can become I-I, about the endless movement of the glance from one figure to the other. Poto&Cabengo is a series of staged double self-portraits in different places and situations, a way of telling personal and fictive stories in a certain location.

The discourse can follow different directions, it is an open script, whose presentation as a work in progress emphasizes not only the importance of the autonomous images, but also the possible narrative links among them.” (Alina Popa & Irina Gheorghe)