Curator: Lia Perjovschi
Opening: February 19th 2009, 19:00
For the first time in the last twenty years, a bank becomes an art
centre. A centre in the centre of the city, not at its outskirts, as we
were used so far by the logic of transition. The spaces for
contemporary art, had they not been already displaced, closed or thrown
at the periphery, are becoming smaller and smaller or more
business-related. The history of the Romanian contemporary art is the
history of the losses – a place, a market, a man, a few ideas. And, as
always, an exaggeration is surpassed by an other, and the lack of the
assorted art units is politically concealed by the ever too big and too
dependent Central Unit: the museum.
An art magazine created a BIennale and now opens ONE permanent centre
for the contemporary art.
The midpoint of PAVILION UNICREDIT is not “the show”, as some may
think, but “the archive/ information”. The main focus here is the “the
knowledge”, the resource.
Any new place and any new project starts with a STATEMENT. In Romanian:
declararaţie de credinţă. What the place want to be, and what it might
be.
STATEMENT is an expositional plan. A route. A process. The storyboard
of a contemporary art centre nowadays. A conceptual expression for the
lines of force structuring the intellectual life and the life in
general. A multidisciplinary programme created with modesty (books,
newspapers, quotations). A data bank and a possibilities bank. Art is
not alone. Art is positioned in a cultural, political and scientific
framework. Works of art admired and then given
away as gifts, replicas more interesting than the original, hundreds of
artists in texts, images, postcards. Institutional history in bags. A
map of ideas that may go wild or may structure itself peacefully. A
laboratory where the spectators become researchers.
STATEMENT breaks the vicious circle built up out of financial
humiliation, bureaucratic imbecility, cultural ignorance and lack of
understanding, institutional autism, the reduction to the state of
always asking and always being rejected without any explanations, and
the state of “everything against you”. STATEMENT uses the
“Do-It-Yourself” resources that the curator-researcher has coalesced
for the last twenty years.
What do we define as an artistic object? Where should the artistic
research start and how far can it go? How free is our thinking?
We have become conservative without even knowing it. We wish to be
avant-gardists, to overthrow things, but we do everything within the
same logic frame. We complain about the same things. We reiterate the
same mistakes. Culturally, we are in the tunnel effect.
What can be done?
What if we change the perspective? What if we watch through the both
ends of the telescope? Here in Universe. Here on Earth. Here in
Romania. Here in Pavilion. The resource in STATEMENT is not only the
art theorist or the cultural philosopher, but also the artist, the
astronaut, the string theory specialist, the astronomer and the
inventor. Are the artists also inventors? How does the world look when
seen from outside the world? Is a T-shirt art? Is a postcard a work of
art? What do some images tell us when they are downloaded from the
Internet and then xerocopied? What does the democratic access to
information imply? For how long can we count on the popular anthology?
Why does Second Life imitate life?
We know what we are made from (our genome), we know where we are (in
the Universe), but do we know why?
(Lia Perjovschi translated for media by Dan Perjovschi)