WRO Art Center presentation and screening
Tuesday 18 / 11 / 08 18h00
supported by the Polish Cultural Institute in Bucharest
The new WRO Art Center (Centrum Sztuki WRO), located at Plac Teatralny 5, Wrocław, arose from the experience and activity of the WRO Foundation Media Art Center, founded in 1989, the only independent organization in Poland specializing in contemporary art, media and technology. The WRO Art Center features regular presentations of contemporary art intertwined with the development of communications tools and processes.
The WRO Art Center offers exhibitions, showings, concerts, screenings, lectures, workshops and publications featuring both Polish and international art. It is designed for artists, curators, critics and art theoreticians as well as for the active and creative culture-oriented public, while original projects cultivating creativity encourage children and teenagers to get familiar with media art. The Center’s aims are to support artistic and educational activities, and to organize international cultural and intellectual exchanges by expanding the WRO collection, making it accessible, collaborating with renowned international art galleries and institutions and through a program of residencies for artists and curators. The WRO Art Center’s gallery, laboratory, archives, reading room and offices are housed in the renovated heritage interiors in the loft of the former Otto Stiebler coffee-roasting plant at the corner of Wrocław’s Plac Teatralny and Widok Street. The specially designed Widok Street façade and entryway also serves as a projection screen in the public space. The Center is open to the public from Tuesday through Sunday. The WRO Art Center is funded by the City of Wrocław and is based on the agreement between the WRO Foundation and the Wrocław municipal authorities.
The presentation will be followed by the screening of several video works from the centre’s archive:
1. Aki Nakazawa, Negai wo hiku, Japan / Germany 2006, 4:35 (premiul I)
2. Pascual Sisto, 28 Years in the Implicate Order, USA 2005 (premiul II)
3. Stadtmusik, Mauerpark, Austria 2007, 17:25 (menţiune specială)
4. Jonas Nilsson, Me & Myself, Sweden 2006, 3:00
5. Dawid Marcinkowski, Sufferrosa, Poland 2007
6. Kurt d'Haeseleer, Fossilization, Belgium 2005, 09:09
7. Łukasz Gronowski, Untitled Works, Poland 2007, 4:46
8. Tal Amiran, Untitled (Band in a Studio), UK 2006, 2:33
9. Istvan Kantor, Revolutionary Song, Canada 2006, 9:32
10. Laurent Vicente, Superarchiskate, France 2006 / 2007, 3:48
11. Dominik Boberski, Estate, Poland 2006, 4:32
12. Jae-kyu Byun, Moving Panorama, Japan 2006, 4:05
13. Monsieur Moo, Neon, France 2005, 00:58
14. Volker Schreiner, Cell, Germany 2006, 4:27
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
Mónica Mayer (Mexico City, 1954), studied visual arts at the Escuela Nacional de Artes Plásticas in
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
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.
