Exhibitions and art installations

Project title: Je passe / J’habite /Je vis en résonance avec la Biennale d’Art Contemporain de Lyon

Schedule:
Authors of the project: focAR group(Alina Tudor and Razvan Neagoe)
Artists in residence: 16th august – 16th september 2011
Exhibition: 17th september – 16th october 2011
Du lundi au vendredi, de 14 h à 19 h
Ouvertures exceptionnelles le samedi 17/09,
de 12h à 22h et le dimanche 18/09, de 11h à 19h

Project context: City Switch
Producer: Roger Tator Galery, France
Organizers: Modernism.ro, Romania, Roger Tator Galery, France
Partners: Romanian Cultural Insitute Paris, France

pe modernism down and here again

Political Decision

A part of our project Political Decision(the film) was included in 23rd Festival Les Instants Vidéo.

poster

‘Steps to Identity’ project in the 2010 Biennial Illumini

London is well known for the busy life going underneath it – whether it’s the underground, tunnels, passages or any other place located under the city itself. The Tube is the transportation option chosen by most of the inhabitants of this city, due to the well-known agglomeration above ground, so we can in fact talk about an entire underground development of the city due to this. Difficult to build from a technical perspective, underground London is actually just as accessible as above ground London. Due to this development, underground London has developed its own identify, due to a whole series of elements that define it, the key word here being “diversity”.
The Greenwich passage is a link part of this chain of underground development, an actual tourist spot while also being an access path used very often – yet maintaining a spectacular architecture.
A large number of pedestrians use this pass daily, from different social categories, age groups and ethnic groups.
Thus, the Greenwich passage reveals itself as an corridor animated by the human crowds, a hallway loaded with different silhouettes, some in a hurry, some relaxed, but all and each one of them adding to the identity imprint of this place with every step laid here.

more details here

exhibition image

MOnuMENTS, UNA Gallery (2010)

MOnuMENTS project starts from the necessity of a reflexion on the deficitary relationship we have with history and recent memory, following a representative piece for the relationship between the political discourse and urban weaving. Developing like a long-term project, MOnuMENTS maps the country following zones: Dobrudja, Banat, Wallachia, Oltenia, Moldavia, Transylvania, Maramures – gathering documentary evidence and archiving monuments of all types on all country territory.

MOnuMENTS represents an indication of the way in which we see our own history and ourselves as people. An indication of ideological values belonging to a certain historic period to which we have referred. An indication of art and politics. Avatars they have undergone throughout the time are a good barometer of political and social changes that have occurred in the space they populate.

Documentation started in 2007, the first event occurred in 2009 on Constantza – Bucharest route and consisted in flowers laid in each monument and marking their regret by standing silently for a minute. The immediate purpose was to draw attention to those monuments forgotten or being in visible degradation.

more details: here

MOnuMENTS project (UNA Gallery 2010)

RED SPOT - Museum of Romanian Peasant, Bucharest, Romania (2008)

In 2008, the Red Spot project was part of the Programme of public art I love Bucharest, part of the European Year for Intercultural Dialogue, which was supported by ProHelvetia through United Experts. It is an art gesture constructed as a signal-project, a project meant to warn the people of Bucharest –inhabitants and authorities, individuals and private companies – and it had as objectives: a building, a street or a monument.

more details: here

RED SPOT- Museum of Romanian Peasant (2008)

“U.T.–Global Warming”, MORA gallery, Bucharest, Romania (2008)

In January 2008 Urban Traces reached the age of one year and we wanted to show the public the project as it is now; a grey city, over polluted, trapped in the problems of habitation and urban aesthetic inherited from the Communist years and the actual consumer. Bucharest got a more intense traffic and more concrete. We discovered that we are the top of the most polluted capitals in Europe.

Exhibition that ends the project makes no exception, thermal assault on visitors simulates the process of global warming and it is a way of getting the visitor involved asking for reaction. We excessively heated the gallery so that everyone got a discomfort but not all the visitors understood the real motive for it.

The exhibition consumes old stages including them or reusing them. The urban map on cloth given to visitors at the entrance is wrapped in plastic. Plastic everywhere; wrapping the walls of the gallery and any object inside is the symbol of consuming, a hint at ubiquitous values of the product taken instead of the cultural value and of course a hint at pollution.

more details: here

U.T.–Global Warming, MORA gallery (2008)

Phone Box, HUMAn program (2008)

We bring into discussion the urban and rural identity through the call box. We will express our thoughts confusion and feelings in relation with the society with the concrete, the grass, the tree, the park, the boulevard, the street. In this way the individual is invited to participate, to look for a position, an attitude so that he may launch a social gesture.

more details: here

Phone Box , HUMAn program (2008)

“U.T.44, 26”, Galateea gallery, (2007)

The following text was the reason for the exhibition at Galateea Gallery in Bucharest:

“The sound represents a vibration of particles of a medium, capable to produce an auditory sensation. The sound propagates under the form of elastic waves only through substances (air, liquid or solids) and cannot be propagated through vacuum. In the air the propagation speed is 340 m/s.

The noise is a disorderly superposition of more sounds. It is produced from natural sources but especially from those anthropic one: equipment, means of transport, machines, people. Sound pollution produces stress, fatigue, diminishing and losing the auditory capacity, psychical instability, fissure of buildings, breaking windows. The noise acts on the whole body because the auditory sensation gets to the central nervous system through which it influences on other organs. The effects perceived by man are: attention is reduced along with working capacity and as a result the risk of accidents grows; installation of the auditory tiredness which can disappear along with the noise disappearance; trauma as a result of the exposion to intense noise for a short time. These traumas can be giddiness, pains lesion of the auditory system and even breaking of this system; – losing weight, irritability,sleeping disorder, deficiency in recognizing colours especially of the red colour, deafness in case of high frequency sounds. The effects depend on the person nature, on complexity, on nature and noise intensity.” The source: Lectures in digital format (http://www.ase.ro/biblioteca/carte2.asp?id=59&idb=).

We had enough with the city noise … and we took it into our gallery. This natural unbearable reaction appeared out of a frustration feeling. We cannot but look at this performance of the Urban.

more details: here

U.T.44, 26, Galateea gallery (2007)

Urban Traces.Urban Pollution, OLD Gallery (2007)

In 2007 in Cluj-Napoca, in the Old Gallery we had a minimal presentation of our project raising for discussion Urban Pollution. We would have liked to show that stencils can get another load if we use them in another drawing. In these cases it was only about cars as they are one of those branches producing fumes.

In the next paragraph was the theme of this exhibition: “A drastic change of the climate is expected if the carbon concentration in atmosphere gets to 550 ppm, which will cause an increase of the temperature with approximately 0,03°C” – The Intergovernmental committee UN for the change of the Climate.

We had a nice feedback and we achieved our object. At the beginning the guests were shocked both seeing and hearing and then after ten minutes they got accustomed to the noise they ignored the effects of the noise. We showed in this, way how much assaulted we are but we are not awave of it.

We tried to show the negative influence of pollution through sewage, canals through waters carrying organic waste, with pathogenic bacterium, fumes.

more details: here

Urban Traces.Urban Pollution, OLD Gallery (2007)

Urban Traces, Cupola gallery (2007)

The second halt of the conventional space was in Iasi where, besides the above-mentioned presentation, we gave the sound track directly in the street to be heard making a bridge between the starting point and the host-city. The tune was purposely meant to remind the old radio emissions – a subtle memory of “the Golden Age/Epoch”, a pendant for the blocks of flats, the heritage left to us by the Golden Age.

more details: here

Urban Traces, Cupola gallery (2007)

Urban Traces - Iasi

Urban Traces, Cupola gallery (2007)

Urban Traces, MORA Gallery (2007)

The starting point of the Project Urban Traces was at Grigore Mora Gallery in Bucharest.

Using for presentation multimedia installation we tried to ask questions about actual burning issues like integration, globalization, localization minorities and the way they are perceived by the citizens of Bucharest. We are interested in what defines us nowadays in a world of simulacra more real than reality, in which advertisement assaults us at every corner of the street options are ready made for us and identity is the definition of a service provided by advertising agencies.

The true statements, the shirts we exhibit are nor black, nor green but inscripted with all the defects of the today’s society which we take upon ourselves. The dirty grey of Bucharest was filtered decomposed in white and black has become a sign, a writing with which we rewrite the history on own skin and the way we perceive it today. The writing has become an image but it still has an obvious critical load in the state of an explicit inscription. The movie, the central piece of the exhibition is our means through which we want to assault the sense of touch, the hearing and the seeing.

Another obvious contrast is that between the image and the sound track, opposing presences which points out two terms: interiority and exteriority, white and black, interior silence and the noise of the street, diversity and uniformity. Urban noise, sound and imagistic background, which accompanies our lives, has as a result desensitization of the city man. And losing sensitiveness is a phenomenon of high irreversibility. In reply there are the images on the gallery’s walls, film stills which become ready-mode to be sent back as the street feed-back which caused them. Traces are a record and a photo of an identity in the urban space, with everything that involves, with the definition of a false understanding subjected to taboos: on thinking and behaving. (Cristiana Radu)

more details: here