Thursday, March 11, 2010, 19:00
ARTIST TALK
IOANA NEMES - TRANSLATING TIME: LOSSES AND GAINS
Ioana Nemes (b.1979) is one of the most acknowledged and exhibited Romanian artists of her generation. She participated, among other shows, in Istanbul Biennial, (2009), U-Turn Copenhagen (2008), Prague Biennial (2007) and Bucharest Biennial (2006). Recently she showed Relics for the Afterfuture (Brown) – a series of sculptures scrutinizing lost Romanian traditional rituals - at Jiri Svestka Berlin. She lives and works in Bucharest.
Ioana Nemes's project Monthly Evaluations goes back to 2001 and is inextricably linked to the events which led to the discovery of her artistic vocation. For Nemes was a professional handball player until an injury put an end to her career and she decided to be an artist. A new world opened to her and to get a perspective on it, she evolved The Wall Project on the dining room wall of the small flat she shared with her mother and twin brother. The wall was divided into two sections, with one side chronicling Nemes's aspirations and unrealized projects while the other chronicled aspirations that had been met and projects that had been realized. Every time a slip was moved from one side to the other, Nemes took a photo and archived it.
In 2004, two things happened that were key to the project: The Wall Project was shown in a gallery, and Nemes moved out of the flat. These events impacted on the project, which came increasingly to be focused around how time might be made visible. Nemes developed a strong interest in the British writer Virginia Woolf's understanding of time, John Fowless narrative and the Swiss psychologist Max Lüscher's ideas about colour, and out of this came Monthly Evaluations. Nemes developed a system with five parameters: physical, emotional, intellectual, financial and the luck factor. Since 2005, each day has been evaluated against these parameters; it is allocated a colour and a quotation or a saying before being archived along with all the other days.
When Monthly Evaluations goes on show, Nemes ponders all the other works to be shown in the exhibition and its overarching idea, and subsequently goes through her archive, plucking out a small clutch of days. These are then translated into murals or plastic objects that resemble funerary stones.
Even though Nemes's starting premise is her own self-realization project, Monthly Evaluations describes a more generic experience which relates to work, ambition, progress and happiness. The project argues for a conception of identity, which, rather than remaining static, is something the individual is continually shaping on the basis of the options and opportunities that present themselves. This is the starting point for Nemes's critical stance vis-à-vis the settings in which she is a player: exhibitions, the wider art scene and the new Europe.
Within the artist-talk at Pavilion Unicredit, Ioana Nemes will explain the context and the reasons that led to the emergence and development of the Monthly Evaluations project – an experiment attempting to render visible (via colors and numbers) the time elapsed throughout a month.
http://ioananemes.tumblr.com
Image: "Positive & Negative", 2004. Courtesy of the artist
Ioana Nemes's project Monthly Evaluations goes back to 2001 and is inextricably linked to the events which led to the discovery of her artistic vocation. For Nemes was a professional handball player until an injury put an end to her career and she decided to be an artist. A new world opened to her and to get a perspective on it, she evolved The Wall Project on the dining room wall of the small flat she shared with her mother and twin brother. The wall was divided into two sections, with one side chronicling Nemes's aspirations and unrealized projects while the other chronicled aspirations that had been met and projects that had been realized. Every time a slip was moved from one side to the other, Nemes took a photo and archived it.
In 2004, two things happened that were key to the project: The Wall Project was shown in a gallery, and Nemes moved out of the flat. These events impacted on the project, which came increasingly to be focused around how time might be made visible. Nemes developed a strong interest in the British writer Virginia Woolf's understanding of time, John Fowless narrative and the Swiss psychologist Max Lüscher's ideas about colour, and out of this came Monthly Evaluations. Nemes developed a system with five parameters: physical, emotional, intellectual, financial and the luck factor. Since 2005, each day has been evaluated against these parameters; it is allocated a colour and a quotation or a saying before being archived along with all the other days.
When Monthly Evaluations goes on show, Nemes ponders all the other works to be shown in the exhibition and its overarching idea, and subsequently goes through her archive, plucking out a small clutch of days. These are then translated into murals or plastic objects that resemble funerary stones.
Even though Nemes's starting premise is her own self-realization project, Monthly Evaluations describes a more generic experience which relates to work, ambition, progress and happiness. The project argues for a conception of identity, which, rather than remaining static, is something the individual is continually shaping on the basis of the options and opportunities that present themselves. This is the starting point for Nemes's critical stance vis-à-vis the settings in which she is a player: exhibitions, the wider art scene and the new Europe.
Within the artist-talk at Pavilion Unicredit, Ioana Nemes will explain the context and the reasons that led to the emergence and development of the Monthly Evaluations project – an experiment attempting to render visible (via colors and numbers) the time elapsed throughout a month.
http://ioananemes.tumblr.com
Image: "Positive & Negative", 2004. Courtesy of the artist