read ruxandra balaci's text
read enrico lunghi's text

"Film is an old invention", says Mark Lewis. "It's a bit dusty, and artists are picking over its remains, re-thinking its history". Fascinated by cinema, its social phenomenon, and its power to seduce, Mark Lewis began to experiment with film in the mid-90s. The artist premises much of his work on the idea that cinema is entering its terminal phase as the medium of choice for mass artistic expression. Mark Lewis' productions have closer ties to the world of independent cinema than to the low-tech video art projects of the recent past. Landscapes is a selection of ten most recent video works of the artist (2001-2005), and will be hosted in MNAC for three months.

Recognized both in North America and in Europe, Mark Lewis’ films have been featured in many solo exhibitions and have been presented in group exhibitions that have conceptualized the growing interest of contemporary artists in the temporal and narrative properties of film:
Re-makes at CAPC Musée d’art contemporain de Bordeaux, and (Based upon) True Stories, at Witte de With in Rotterdam, in 2003; Liverpool Biennal at the Tate Liverpool, in 2002; Mois de la Photo à Montréal, in 2001; Intelligence: New British Art 2000 at the Tate Britain in London, in 2000; Cinema! Cinema! The Cinematic Experience at the Stedelijk Van Abbemuseum d’Eindhoven, in 1999; and L’effet cinéma, at the Musée d’art contemporain de Montréal, in 1997.

Valentin Stefanoff & Nina Kovacheva - Au-delà de ce qui est visible
7 December - 7 March 2006
curator: Ruxandra Balaci
project coordinator: Carmen Iovitu

Nina Kovacheva and Valentin Stefanoff come from a generation of Bulgarian contemporary artists that has already been recognised internationally. They are currently living and working in Paris as well as Sofia.

Au-delà de ce qui est Visible (2004), video installation.
The video installation is composed of scenes without audio, situated in different contexts - huge visages (4x5m), that are attempting to communicate with the viewers or passers-by, talking to them, calling to them and gesticulating. Despite their efforts, the visages remain isolated, misundertstood behind the grating of the window. The theme of the project is the relation mass-individual, isolation, the loss of the individual’s personality. Utilizing this specific method of presentation, the artists desire not only to incite the random passer-by toward contemporary art, but also to present a series of sociological questions and problems.
(Nina Kovacheva, Valentin Stefanoff)

How Near So Far (2005), video projection, 4 min in loop.
The upward movement of the camera in black and white is following across the field the nervous race of a person. The camera wants to “observe” the running person, to frame it, to show it, to discover it through its gaze, for the gaze’s sake. Little by little the image finds its colour. The obsessive rhythm of the music is accelerating to sufficiency while the race goes on, the focus point - the running legs, becoming the object of desire. What do we expect from our desires? Is this video capable of catching the pray? But where the race goes? The camera is unstable; it staggers, comes closer or immediately goes away, branch off, threatens to fall exactly like the bear legs of the running woman. Recorded at the grass level, the uneven trajectory of this race will it lead to a dead end?
(Tania Vladova)

The Stranger in Us (2005), video installation, 12 min in loop.
Two faces, two artists facing one spectator or more, ultimately, facing each other. The stranger is in us, outside us, in front of us. A male voice in the background spells out an English written text of Nina Kovacheva and Valentin Stefanoff. The amassing portraits of the two artists– always the same but different altogether – on the black ground, the back sound, the songs of birds, the rain, well, all create a hypnotical vision where the same assessments and the same questions come back in loops. The portraits blink at times and darken themselves for a second then rapidly retaking the course of questioning and looking at each other. The play of gazes amplifies. The two portraits-artists-spectators are isolated, each confined within their panel. The condition of the artist is therefore its solitude, its strangeness facing herself/himself.
(Tania Vladova)

Wet Contact (2002), video projection, 30min in loop.
A screen separated in two. A split screen. Two faces. A man and a woman - the faces of the authors. Both of them are looking straight into the camera. The camera does not move. At the first minutes nothing happens. The viewer has an illusion they are looking at him. They observe him… They are expecting something from him…
Suddenly water slaps the face of one of them. The slaps alternate between the one and the other. Some of water slaps are very strong and painful.
The lighting changes as if the day is passing.
The sound track was created from sound samples recorded from everyday life in conjunction and mixed with a music composed by Heinz Weber.
In Wet Contact, operating with language close to minimalism, the authors drive the spectators to recognize almost physically the aggression, the loneliness, observing the male and female reaction, pressing them to ask basic questions about existence in contemporary society.
(Nina Kovacheva, Valentin Stefanoff)

Under Destruction #2: Coridorul din Casa Poporului / The Corridor in the House of the People
14 october
Santiago Sierra (Spain/Mexico)
curator Mihnea Mircan

www.santiago-sierra.com
www.prometeo-arte.it
www.helgadealvear.net

MNAC Bucharest hosted Santiago Sierra’s largest project to date, as the second episode of Under Destruction – a series of site-specific interventions by international artists, invited to engage polemically the political significance of the new location of the museum. Since October 2004, MNAC occupies a wing in the Palace of the Parliament, formerly known as the House of the People.

The House of the People is the second largest building in the world, a product of terminal communist megalomania, disconnected from practical necessity and completely isolated from the life of the city. After the 1989 Romanian revolution, it was re-branded as the product of the constructive genius of the nation and taken over by the new administrations. It can be described as the perfect backdrop for enacting the post-communist syndrome, it functions as the locus of Romania’s conflicted relation to its recent history and is featured in every guide as the main tourist attraction in Bucharest.

The corridor conceived by Santiago Sierra immobilized and obliterated the entire space of the museum, constraining visitors to a predetermined path of obsessive repetition. The performance enacted in the corridor produced the extreme actualization of a stereotype about Romania, a fragment of the rudimentary sociology that divides the world between advanced nations and nations smothered in their mediocre destiny, between winners and losers in the game of history. A description repeatedly purported by media reports acquires the proportions of Greek tragedy. The performance suggests being trapped in preconception, waking up in a nightmare of purely schematic thinking, in an eyeless space deprived of depth and contours. The project adapts to the local context Santiago Sierra’s practice of testing the limits, their relevance and resilience, of pushing things to political and economic extremes, creating scenarios that work like exercises in agonizing futility, amassing obstacles and exacerbating antagonisms.

Santiago Sierra’s art builds upon contradiction – it starts from a question and complicates it until it becomes deafening. The project in Bucharest engages the logic of exclusion, the labeling and negotiation that occurs around and across real or imaginary borders. The corridor generates an extraterritorial space where two representations of the Romanian people – the enslaved mass indirectly, cynically portrayed by the ‘House of the People’ and the present-day cliché resulting from economic disparity or vastly reductive thinking – are confronted and collapsed.

Project realized with the support of:
Prometeo arte contemporanea (Lucca), Helga de Alvear Gallery (Madrid)

Kinema IKON Retrospect
6 October 2005 - 6 February 2006
curators: Raluca Velisar, Stefan Tiron
http://kinema-ikon.projects.v2.nl

opening concert: Dyslex, SelfMadeMusic

kinema ikon (1970-) – multimedia atelier at the Art Museum Arad (RO) is the oldest ongoing experimental art group in Romania. The thirty-five years of existence are the result of an optimum equilibrium between the participative, collaborative or group projects, and the individual works. Something between the satisfaction of the collective creation and the satisfaction of the auctorial egotism. Therefore, the stylistic mark of kinema ikon occurs from the interdisciplinary approach of a certain medium (film, video, hypermedia) with the specific tools of the different fields its members activate in (artists, writers, architects, photographers, musicians, programmers, etc.)

kinema ikon has undergone three different stages: experimental film (1970-19890), video art (1990-19930), and from 1994 on, exclusively hypermedia works as interactive installations on cd-rom, and as net.art. Both individual works and the group works – Opera Prima, Commedia del Multimedia, alteridem.exe and Hymera - are stylistically characterized by experimental, eclectic and playful forms of expression. The resulting works are sensible objects, having an aspect of digital chimera, set in a non-linear fictional discourse, allowing multiple possibilities to the user’s interactive approach.
The group publishes periodically the intermedia magazine, the theoretical dimension of its member’s interest in the new media.
Members of the group: George Sabau, multimedia theorist; Calin Man, media artist; Alin Gherman, programmer; Judit Angel, art critic and curator; Peter Hügel, archaeologist; Caius Grozav, programmer, Romulus Bucur, poet; Roxana Chereches, philologist; Ioan Ciorba, sound engineer.

For more details a catalogue is available upon request. The Catalog is an offset complement to the retrospective and prospective exhibition in the autumn of 2005, in the spaces of the fourth floor of the MNAC, an exhibition configured into 7 modules, with 14 screens / displays, reflecting the stages underwent: experimental movies with workshop logs + mixed media with the conversatia magazine + hypermedia in all digital formats, that is, CD ROM, installations and net work, together with the intermedia magazine and again + ki_next generation with web kf-art.
This catalog is accompanied by a demo on DVD, synthetically comprising the kinema ikon opera omnia.

sptv.org by casa gontz
4 September - 9 November
www.sptv.org

read statement pdf

poltur ltd. by casa gontz
4 September - 9 November
Curator: Mihnea Mircan

read statement pdf

OFFSET [2004] / 4 September - 9 November
a project by underconstruct.com with the support of HAG Art Foundation
http://offset.underconstruct.com

Depot - "This is not an exhibition"
curator: Mihai Oroveanu
1 September 2005 - 1 May 2006

read statement pdf

Video Works
Jaan Toomik
2 June - 1 September
Curator: Mihnea Mircan

This is the largest retrospective to date of one of the most significant Estonian video artists. It brings together works created by Jaan Toomik between his 1995 “Dancing Home” to “Waterwall”, made in 2005. Toomik’s particular video minimalism, associated to such an ‘antiquated notion’ (to quote the artist) as emotional intensity is highlighted via an installation structured around speech as its guiding principle.

read pdf


Waterwall, 2005	installation view

Peeter and Mart, 2001-2002	Dancing with Dad, 2003

LIQUID MATTER
Dan Mihaltianu
2 June - 31 July
curated by Florin Tudor & Raluca Velisar

Visual research on the interaction of geopolitical positions, international lifestyle and local cultural background in different urban agglomerations around the world. It looks into a wide range of aspects: from water resources, to financial resources (liquidity, liquidation, money laundry), to political aspects (transparency, clearness) and further on to liquor & food culture, as a local flavour of the contemporary way of life.

Interventions in the National Museum of Contemporary Art and the residual spaces left over after the new architectural configuration of the building.
An attempt to contextualize works conceived in the very period of the construction of the People's House as well as the ones produced in the last fifteen years, when this place became the core of controversies, conflicts, games of power and of interests of the Romanian society.

read text by Ileana Pintilie (romanian only)


Canal Grande, 1986	Liquid Time, 2003

Union, 2005

ixi software
enrike hurtado and thor magnusson
22 July - 20 September / second floor
curator: Florin Tudor

"ixi software is an experimental project concerned with building prototypes for musical instruments. We are interested in the computer as a workshop for building non-conventional tools for musicians, i.e. not trying to imitate or copy the tools that we know from the real world of instruments and studio technology. We currently work with open source software and try to build interesting graphical front-ends to software such as Pure Data or Supercollider, but our aim is also to distribute our applications such that everybody can use them, making them simple and intuitive to use.

So download the programs, test them out, use them, distribute them, crack them and do whatever you want except sell them."

www.ixi-software.net

apps: virus, slicer, lauki, spindrum.

/ixi software/ since 2002 lectures and workshops at the academy of fine arts in vienna, at the pompeu fabra university in barcelona, the faculty of art and design of hull; the department of electroacustic music at the university of huddersfield, at ica in london, at the mit-medialab in dublin, the media lab uiah helsinki and at arteleku center in san sebastian.

Kid Koala (ninja tune / uk) - dj set
opening Khidja Clouds Society (with Vexx) / Ubic
Friday 30 September 21h00

Kunstraum Deutschland
10 June - 10 July
Curator: Ursula Zeller
Exhibition realized and itinerated by IFA Stuttgart
Artists: Armando, Tony Cragg, Marianne Eigenheer, Ayse Erkmen, Christine Hill, Magdalena Jetelová, Per Kirkeby, Joseph Kosuth, Marie-Jo Lafontaine, Simone Mangos, Nam June Paik, Giuseppe Spagnulo, Wawrzyniec Tokarski and herman de vries


Tony Cragg	Joseph Kosuth	Nam June Paik

3j40
16 june - 7 july
Kumiko Inui, Tomio Mabuchi, Naoyuki Nagata
curated by Cosmina Goagea, Atsuro Osada

DemoKino - Virtual Biopolitical Agora
an Anti-entertainment Interactive Movie
A project by DAVIDE GRASSI
3rd of June

DemoKino is a virtual parliament that through topical film parables provides the voters (participants) with the opportunity to decide on issues that are, paradoxically, becoming the essence of modern politics: the questions of life.
The project questions not only the utopia of contemporary virtual forum that is supposed to open ways for a more direct and influential participation but also points out a much deeper problem of modern democracy (virtual as well).
With its reduced narrativeness - the story is built on the "pro and contra" inner dialogues of the protagonist who is led around his home in a parliamentary kind of way by the "voters", based on their decisions - Demokino shows how these ethical dilemmas of modern life suddenly become the core of our political participation.
When the issue of life enters the political arena and modern politics becomes biopolitics (as the italian philosopher Giorgio Agamben is stating) the democratic decision reaches an impasse: in the political arena laws are being debated on issues that can actually tolerate no decisions and any kind of majority rule is problematic in itself, any political regulation a publicly legitimated act of violence.
Demokino is a virtual parliament that clearly displays how politics comes before law. Law is just a utopic and redundant technical procedure to cover the political essence.

Muzeul de pictura / The Painting Museum
16 may - 22 may
Curator: Florin Tudor

Artists: Silaghi Adalbert, Manole Adoc, Corneliu si Ramona Andronescu, Ana Emilia Apostolescu, Unknown Author, Corneliu Baba, Sabin Balasa, Marcel Bejgu, Calin Beloescu, Mihaela Bighiu, Ion Bitzan, Traian Bradean, Corneliu Brudascu, Doina Catargiu, Ruxandra Papa Cebuc, Vasile Celmare, Spiru Chintila, Octavian Ciocsan, Cici Constantinescu, Theodoru Doaga, Elisabeta Dorobat, Adrian Dumitrache, Zamfir Dumitrescu, Traian Filip, Horia Flamînd, Aurel Gîrjoaba, Elena Greculesi, Ion Sulea Gorj, Dan Hatmanu, Georgeta Ilie, Corneliu Ionescu, Ion Irimescu, Ion Jalea, Andrei Koss, Iacob Lazar, Augustin Lucaci, Viorel Marginean, Pavel Mercea, Vintila Mihaescu, Eftimie Modîlca, Ioan Moszelka, Emilia Niculescu, Constantin Nitescu, Ioana Oltes, Eugen Palade, Vasile Pop Negresteanu, Nicolae Eugen Petrescu, Toma Roata, Doru Rotaru, Mihai Rusu, Albin Stanescu, Ion Stendl, Lia Szasz, Liviu Suhar, Vladimir Setran, Valentin Tanase, Ion Taralunga, Andrasy Zoltan, Aristotel A. Vasiliu, Pavel Veres, Nicolae Vînatoru, Artur Andrei Vetro, Ioan Visan, Mircea Vremir.

The Sound of a Historical Conflict / Sound installation: Aurel Cornea

A society that wants to build the future must know its past, its real past, as it was. If I - a living witness, one who experienced those times - don't speak about them, then others who did not experience or witness those times will invent their own version of them.

O societare care isi construieste viitorul trebuie sa-si cunoasca trecutul, adevaratul trecut, exact asa cum s-a petrecut. Daca eu - un martor care a trait acele timpuri - nu vorbesc despre ele, atunci altii care nu au trecut prin acele vremuri isi vor inventa propria versiune asupra faptelor pe care nu le-au trait.

download mp3

Texts: Matei Bejenaru, Cosmin Costinas, Catalin Gheorghe, Mihnea Mircan, Andrei Siclodi, Stefan Tiron
read texts

The exhibition "The Museum of Painting" is an exploration in the dark side of the Romanian painting from the last few decades: homage portraits, celebrations of communist accomplishments, socialist realism formulas for the artists who helped consolidating the leader's cult for personality. The exhibition proposes the use of the residual spaces resulted in the process of transforming the House of People halls into the "white cube" destined to host the contemporary art museum. The result of the attempt to mask the resistance structure and the original design of the House, was a very interesting place: a combination of concrete, traces of socialist decoration, and pauper filling attempts. This space represents for me the space of history. The 1 meter distance between the socialist concrete and the contemporary art museum gypsum board encloses the history of the last fifteen years. It is a place in which one can find hidden a part of the paintings which, in the times of Ceausescu, were glorifying our leader.
Together with this nucleus of works placed in the socialist core of the museum, the exhibition presents a "reading room" in which are displayed the "Arta" magazine collection, a number of papers from those years and the recent studies o the period. Also there is a "Cabinet", in which other works illustrate the main sub themes and iconographical and stylistic ….of the period. In the "Cabinet", the exhibition structure was influenced by the feeling of dishonesty which surrounds the works. This is the reason why we opted for an approach based on the study of the main deviations in the artistic context of the period, and not for the historical approach.
The project is an attempt to reopen the debate on the subject of the Romanian art in the socialist context, and can be considered an intervention, a preamble to an ample critical and theoretical analysis, in the years to come. (Florin Tudor)

Dan Hatmanu _Aniversary

La Nuit des Musees/White Night at The Museum
14/15 may
The museum will be open all night long with a special program of film/video screenings (Spoiler TV group) and experimental music. All the exhibitions will stay opened till 2 o clock, the entrance is free. The event is synchronization with the similar event that will take place in Paris at the very same time, and it is conceived with the support of Direction des Musees de France

Terrains Fertiles/ dance performance:
18h00 Carla Bottiglieri, Ortensia – ground floor
19h00 Ion Dumitrescu, Backing Thoughts – auditorium
19h30 David Subal & Michkazu Matsune, Store – mediateque
21h30 Catalina Gubandru, Above the Roof – caffeteria
22h00 – 24h00 Terrains Fertiles (Linda Samaraweeroya, Ria Probst, Carla Bottiglieri, Brahim Sourny, David Subal & Michkazu Matsune, Kataline Patkai, Ion Dumitrescu, Catalina Gubandru, Carmen Cotofana, Vlaicu Golcea), 1st floor

At the border by sptv.org
22h00

Bottega Areté: Mathias Mortensen, Rune Brink, Christian Zander (all Copenhagen), Miloš Jovanovic (Bucuresti), Andrej Waldegg (Vienna), Lo Iacono (Mainz), Sebastien Loghman ( Leuville – sur – Orge), Harald Scherz (Vienna), Adrian Aghenitei (Barcelona), Alexandra Croitoru (Bucuresti), Guy Bourdin (Heaven), Harald Hund (Vienna), Casa Gontz (Vienna), Karl Killian (Vienna), Moment Factory (Montreal), Guido Braun (Frankfurt), Robin Sloan and Thompson (Tampa), Anna Jermolaewa (Vienna), Eye – Hz (Paris)

DJ Vasile, Electric Brother & Save As, Vj Casa Gontz, Vj Harald Scherz

Terrains Fertiles in Bucharest
25 april - 14 may 2005
http://www.terrainsfertiles.org/

HEXSTATIC LIVE (Ninja Tune - UK)
7 May 2005, 21h00
coordinator: Cosmin Tapu

When MTV aired its first ever music video on August 1, 1981, it was no coincidence that it was "Video Killed the Radio Star" by The Buggles. Since that moment, the music video has grown to be a discipline apart, acting as a showcase for creativity and innovation. Fast forward two decades to 2001 and no one had yet thought of recording an album with the videos already built in to it. Then along came UK duo HEXSTATIC from Ninja Tune with their debut audio-visual LP "Rewind." It featured a CD-Rom music video, which the user could play on their computer and watch while listening to the music.
HEXSTATIC are Stuart Warren Hill and Robin Brunson, and together they have been vibing club-goers since '95, taking the AV/VJ phenomenon to new levels and consistently breaking new grounds in Audio-Visual entertainment.

HEXSTATIC are performing the second time in a museum after Guggenheim in Bilbao, last year.

"…the sweep and creativity of HEXSTATIC's mixing stand out… HEXSTATIC clips are as meaningful as they are busy… Though definitely caffeinated and propulsive enough for the clubs, HEXSTATIC is also warm and reflective enough to establish Warren-Hill and Brunson as artists during the coming years." Steven Boone, leading US new media magazine Res.

Check www.hexstatic.tv

opening: electric brother live feat.marta hristea/ vlaicugolcea/ ion baciu jr.

OFFSET[2004] (off-line) - cd presentation
20 april, 19h00, mediateque/caffeteria

special guests :
ELECTRIC BROTHER - dj set
COSMIN MOLDOVAN & SERGIU DOROFTEI - vj

OFFSET[2004] (on-line)
http://offset.underconstruct.com/

a project by Underconstruct.com with the support of HAG Art Foundation

EUROPE IN ART - A HVB Group Project
11 march - 17 april
Works from the collections of HVB Bank Austria, Bulgaria, Czech Republic, Germany, Hungary, Poland, Romania and Slovakia.

Artists: Berenice ABBOTT, Nobuyoshi ARAKI, Joseph BEUYS, Henri CARTIER-BRESSON, Laszlo FEHER, FISCHLI & WEISS, Andreas GURSKY, Candida HOFFER, Peter KOGLER, Oskar KOKOSCHKA, Imi KNOEBEL, Hermann NITSCH, Sigmar POLKE, Arnulf RAINER, Gerhard RICHTER, Michael RITTSTEIN, Svetlin RUSSEV, Serge SPITZER, Wolfgang TILLMANS, Massimo VITALI, Erwin WURM and others.

Erwin Wurm _Palmers, 1997	Gerhard Richter _524-4 Flug, 1983	Wolfgang Tillmans _Isa Dancing, New York, 1995

ART DIGITAL VIDÉO
24 february - 20 march
MNAC & L'institut Francais de Bucharest

Curator: Laurence Hazout-Dreyfus
Artists: Haluk Akakçe, Julien Alma + Laurent Hart, Julien Baumann, Tobias Bernstrup, Tobias Bernstrup + Palle Torsson, Mathieu Briand, Sadie Chandler, Marcel Croubalian + Nathalie Novarina, Jean-Gilles Décosterd + Philippe Rahm, Feng Mengbo, Pierre Giner, Felix Stephan Huber, Kolkoz (Samuel Boutruche + Benjamin Moreau), Martin Le Chevalier, Zilla Leutenegger, Katarina Löfström, Melik Ohanian, Sven Påhlsson, Bruno Samper, Stéphane Sautour + Virgine Barré, Palle Torsson, Patrick Tuttofuoco, Tim White, Italo Zuffi

a project by AFAA (L'Association Française d'Action Artistique) & Ministere Francais des Affaires Etrangeres

Happy Sundays @ The Museum
organizer Cosmin Tapu
Happy Sundays @the Museum #1 / 6 February
DJ RUSU & DJ FLORE (Khidja Clouds Society)
Happy Sundays@The Museum #2 / 20 March
Tom Wilson / DJ set, MI KA, neuro_me and Raluca Teodoru / visuals
Happy Sundays@The Museum #3 / 10 April
Dj Camil & Guests, VJ Oki, SuziHiena / visuals
Happy Sundays@the museum#4 / 22 May
DJ set Kosak & Vania, VJ Neuro_me, SuziHiena
Happy Sunday@the museum #5 / 10 July
DJ Rock (Bucharest), DJ Mooner (München)
Happy Sundays@the museum #6 / 2 September
gojira & kosak, vania / DJs, dreamrec, mean mean, casa gontz, razvan petre / visuals
Happy Sundays @ The Museum # 7 / 23 October
Ion & Vali
Happy Sundays @ The Museum # 8 / 4 December
Boru, Amateur Girls / DJs, Agnes Lukacs / visual