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Sufferings of the light / 28 November - 05 December / Kalinderu Medialab

photographs by Codruta Buciscanu / a program coordinated by Iosif Kiraly
Project supported by the Aquarius Foundation and UE-Phare

Coop_02 Media Festival / 26 June - 10 July / Kalinderu Medialab



Concept_cooperation between artists and dj's in bucharest. Coop will present projections of media art, installations and for one night live sessions, sound, audio experiments. After the first night party and live interventions we plan to keep all the installations and video projections for two weeks in the gallery together with materials from the opening as a sort of documented archaeology.

visuals_Agricola de Cologne, Zbynek Baladran, Anca Benera, Sorin Boncea, Angela Bontas, Irina Botea, Sarawut Chutiwongpeti, Ioan Cocan, Nicolae Comanescu, Stefan Constantinescu (special thanks IASPIS), Stefan Cosma, Dan Dinoiu, Daniel Gontz, Eugen Gustea, Matt Hope, Imericani (Andres Garcia, Alessio Tognola, Steve Buchanan, Bathasard Boisseau, Jerome Doudet), Dilmana Iordanova, Zorica Jevremovic, David Kalika, Mihaela Kavdanska & Dan Miron, Szabolcz KissPall, Peter Lassel, Ninon Liotet & Olivier Schulbaum, Jordan Mena, Luminita Mihai, Gili Mocanu, David Mozny, Radka & Stanislav Muller, Radu Negulescu, Ioana Nemes, Jakub Nepras, Carrusca Nuno, Andreea Paduraru, Alina Pentac, Jonathan Phillips, Irina Radu & Nandu, Paolo Ravalico Scerri, Harald Scherz, Julio Soto, Maria Stan, Floe Tudor, Camil Tulcan, Mona Vatamanu / British Council_Sensurround Manchester_Trevor Johson, curator Philip Ilson_Mary Rogers, Georgina Roberts, James Stevenson_, Scott Abraham, Peter Wobser, Laura Drew, Mr Scruff, Segun, Anthony Burrill & Paul Plowman, Graham Hector, Steve Sanderson, Andy Votel, Michael Chetcuti, Meam, Henry Smitson & Simon Marsland, Jai Moodie & Box/ Trieste Contemporanea Committee (Italy)_Central European Video Presentation _curator_Giuliana Carbi (co-curators_Ruxandra Balaci, Anna Balvanyos & Dora Hegyi, Petar Cucovic, Lilia Dragneva, Natasa Ilic, Ilona Nemeth, Jerzy Onuch, Bojana Piskur, Gezim Qendro, Inna Reut, Viktorija Vaseva Dimenska, Maria Vassileva, Aleksandra Wiecka, Sabrina Zannier): Anna Baumgart, Pavel Braila, Benet Broja, Paolo Comuzzi, Vuk Cosic, Marijan Crtalic, Giuliana Cuneaz, Anna Daucikova, Marta Deskur, Boryana Dragoeva, Veaceslav Druta, Ilir Dupi, Valie Export, Lazar Foti, Rudina Hyka, Daniela Kostova, Patrik Kovakovsky, Ivan Moudov, Hajnal Nemeth, Renata Poljak, Stefan Rusu, Rostopasca, Igor Savchenko, Andrei Savich, Dzenis Siniuhin, Janos Sugar, Apolonija Sustersic, Zaneta Vangeli, Alexander Vereschak, Saso Vrabic, Natalia Vujosevic, Flora Watzal, Erwin Wurm, Margarita Zinets / ATA center for contemporary art_curator Mihaela Kavdanska: Boriana Dragoeva, Daniela Kostova, Ivan Moudov, Hristo Jordanov & Ivan Nikolov, Boriana Pandova, Deyan Raykov
sound_DJ Marika, DJ Mike, Electric Brother, Nemos.
curators: Nicolae Comanescu, Floe Tudor, Mona Vatamanu, DJ Mike.



FREE ASSOCIATIONS
text by Mihnea Mircan
As is the case with all good traditions, Coop_2 expands the ideas and attitudes behind Coop_1. The generous space of the Kalinderu Medialab, one of the venues of the recently established National Museum of Contemporary Art, allowed the curators of the show - Nicolae Comanescu, Florin Tudor, Mona Vatamanu and Dj Mike-, to invite considerably more artists to contribute their images and sounds to the event. In contrast with the regular paucity of the local art scene, the opening night of the festival aimed at creating an electronic version of the Flaubert syndrome. It challenged the perceptual habits of the audience with the projection of over 100 films, two photography exhibitions, interactive computer installations, a site-specific project, a performance and the music of two Dj's and two electronic music bands. It was an event of perceptual simultaneity, a fertile chaos of instantaneous contact and divergence.
Coop_2 is based on a non-concept, polymorphously structured on constantly re-arranged juxtapositions. One of the effects of such a standpoint is that it defers, eludes and displaces any preconceived notions of the artwork, clearing the way for always different attitudes and experiences. On another level, by replacing selection with agglomeration and theoretical structure with a streaming of potentialities, the curators encourage viewers to extract a personal syntax from the exhibition.. This syntax, idiosyncratic as attention spans are, indeterminate as walking and seeing, will certainly be different from the art-historical crash-course that exhibitions tend to subject their viewers to, and more akin to the operations that lie at the heart of contemporary art, like clicking and dragging, cutting and pasting, freeze frame and replay, cross-fading, back-spinning and scratching.
Coop_2 also incorporates the works presented in Trieste Contemporanea Festival and Sensurround (Manchester), as well as video art from the collection of the ATA Center for Contemporary Art. Due to the fluid abundance of visual material and the collision of private interests, the Medialab resembled in many ways a busy crossroads. It is perhaps no coincidence that urban culture and the intricate layering of the cityscape feature prominently among the concerns of many films shown in the festival. These video pieces capture images of the city as intersections of planes and screens, as electric affairs between the virtual and the tangible. "Invisible Cities", a work by the American artist Julio Soto, is divided into three episodes: "Cities [and] Memory", "Cities [and] the Dead", "Cities [and] Desire". The first episode questions the cinematic approach that haunts today's architecture: it starts off with a bird's-eye view of the city and proceeds to a subtle play upon distances, which gives way to uncertainty regarding the object of this investigation. We cannot discern whether what we see is an actual building or its tentative, frail architectural model. The indecision is violently resolved, when constructions become derelict and models simulate entropy. "Cities [and] the Dead" dissects a single viewpoint into disparate modes of existence of or in the city. In the same image, two spaces that belong to different contexts and times interpenetrate, engendering the contexlessness of memory. The visible world is pervaded by the possibility of another one. The significantly bracketed conjunction in the title of each episode suggests the inability to tell the difference between possible definitions, to delineate with precision the realm within which these forces operate, corrupting, slowing down and inflecting the rapid scan of the city dweller.
"Hygienic and Safe", by the Romanian Daniel Gontz and the Austrian Harald Scherz, subverts the logic of the surveillance camera. Any presence registered by it is perceived as a potentially threatening one, but the artists conduct their surveillance on neutral individuals doing conspicuously harmless things. In an abrupt change, a surveillance camera placed in an awkward position records the theft of another camera, but not the identity of the perpetrator, thus collapsing the roles of aggressor and victim. We are surrounded by an architecture conceived increasingly for the display of audio-visual information rather than for the location of real bodies. The more fluently we manage to duplicate our worlds, the more provisional and doubtful seems our grasp. In a markedly different register, Ivan Moudov takes up similar issues in "Traffic Control". Although he is dressed up as a Bulgarian police officer, his self-assured gesticulation earns him the compliance of drivers on the streets of Vienna. The artist breaks the code of power, entering the scene as both offender and respected figure of authority. And, also in Vienna, Erwin Wurm poses in "Der Nachbar" as a "terminally self-conscious" voyeur. Is Wurm's neighbour recording on camera Wurm's innocuous ritual of getting in touch with the flora in his backyard, is it the other way around? Or is there simply no neighbour?
"Non-Stop Station" by Nicolae Comanescu engages the poly-rhythmic subject of the contemporary city. Like Duchamp's "Bicycle Wheel", the underground train is moving, but is always in a station, always having just reached destination. There is no in-between, no interstice separating point of departure from goal. We can read this as an ironic comment on the ideal modern trip, but the implications are wider. The space of the contemporary city is structured like a network of arrivals, voids and exits, of terminus points; it conflates unfolding, reversal, and doubling.