VENICE.- In the period 7 June – 22 November 2009, the 53rd Venice Art Biennale will unfold, under the generic heading Making Worlds. The Seductiveness of the Interval, the project that will represent
Romania this year at the
Venice Art Biennale, was selected following the competition organised by the Ministry of Culture, Religions and National Heritage in late January.
The winning team, made up of artists Ştefan Constantinescu, Andrea Faciu, Ciprian Mureşan, curator Alina Şerban, and architects Alex Axinte and Cristi Borcan (studio BASAR), offers a reflection on the exhibition as a semantically mobile autonomous spatial and temporal structure, which suspends quotidian experience in order to enclose spectators within a temporal and spatial interval with which they become eventually complicit.
Directing a constrictive exhibition route, marked by stage-set and mise-en-scène elements, artists Ştefan Constantinescu, Andrea Faciu and Ciprian Mureşan pursue an unfolding of the viewing experience that reaches a crescendo, establishing a new relationship between objects and space, between the viewer’s time and the exhibition time. The artists’ projects (subjectively) juxtapose events, real-life situations, and stories, whose narrative and discursive structure recalls the world of theatre, film and literature. Delimiting a reality that is theatrical and temporal par excellence, The Seductiveness of the Interval sets out to draw the subject into a new reality, not just as an observer, inviting him to identify a network of motivations, causal links between multiple landscapes, sequences and transitions presented within the exhibition, in order ultimately to ensure the coherence of the whole.
Ştefan Constantinescu (b. 1968) lives and works in Stockholm and Bucharest. He receives his BA from Art University Bucharest in 1996 and his MA in 1998 from Royal Academy of Arts, Stockholm. Solo and group exhibitions (selection): 2009 Bad Times/Good Times, FUTURA, Prague; 2008 The Golden Age of Children, Botkyrka Konsthall, Stockholm (solo), PERIFERIC 8 – Art as a gift, Biennial for contemporary art, Iaşi; Dada East? Romanian Context of Dadaism, Zacheta Gallery, Warsaw; 2007 Thanks for A wonderful, Ordinary Day, MNAC, Bucharest (solo), 2006 The Passage, H.arta Gallery, Timisoara (solo); indirect speech, Kunsthalle Fridericianum, Kassel; 2005 On Difference #1. Local Contexts –Hybrid Spaces, Württembergischer Kunstverein, Stuttgart; 2004 Blick 2004, Kunstverein Munchen, Munchen.
Andrea Faciu (b. 1977) lives and works in Munich, Germany. She graduated Akademie der Bildenden Künste Munich, professor Olaf Metzel class. Solo and group exhibitions (selection): 2009 Lothringer13 Städtische Kunsthalle, Munich (solo); Reading the City, ev+a 33rd Edition, Limerick City Gallery of Art, Ireland; 2008 Favoriten 08, Kunstbau/Städtische Galerie in Lenbachhaus, Munich, Between the Images, Romanian Cultural Institute Stockholm in cooperation with Cinemateket, IASPIS, Index – The Swedish Contemporary Art Foundation, wip:konsthall; 2007 Verwendungsnachweis, Project space - MMK Museum fuer Moderne Kunst, Frankfurt/Main; 2006 PERIFERIC 7, Focussing Iaşi, Social Processes; 2004 MANIFESTA 5, Biennial for Contemporary Art, San-Sebastian, Spania; LOVE IT OR LEAVE IT, 5th Cetinje Biennial; 2003 In the Gorges of the Balkans, Kunsthalle Fridericianum, Kassel.
Ciprian Mureşan (b. 1977) lives and works in Cluj, Romania. He graduated Academy of Fine Arts, Cluj-Napoca in 2000. Solo and group exhibitions (selection): 2009 The Generational: Younger Than Jesus, New Museum, New York; 2008 Auto da Fe, Andreiana Mihail Gallery, Art Statements, Basel (solo); Monument to Transformation, Fragment #7: Communism Never Happened/ Vocabulary, Tranzit, Bratislava; Fusion // Confusion, Museum Folkwang Essen, Essen; 2007 I Believe I Can Fall, Kontainer Gallery, Los Angeles (solo); 1’st Athens Biennale, Athens; 2006 PERIFERIC 7 / Focussing Iasi, Why Children?; 2006 Choose..., Plan B Gallery, Cluj-Napoca (solo).
Alina Şerban (b. 1978) is an art historian and curator. She lives and works in Bucharest, Romania. She has a Degree in the History and Theory of Art and a Master’s Degree in Visual Arts (2005), both from the National University of the Arts, Bucharest. She is the co-founder and co-ordinator of the Centre for Visual Introspection, Bucharest (www.pplus4.ro). In 2006, she took part in the Kuratorenwerkstatt programme at the Kunsthalle Fridericianum Kassel, where she was curator of the Indirect Speech exhibition. She is involved in research projects, giving theoretical presentations and lectures at various international conferences. In parallel, since 2002, she has been working as a curator in the activity of independent spaces in Bucharest, and has developed specific publishing and exhibition projects both locally and internationally.
studioBASAR is an architectural office established in 2006 in Bucharest by Alex Axinte (b. 1979 Ploiesti) si Cristi Borcan (b.1979 Ploiesti) as a search-and-rescue team, concerned with building as well as discourse in the public space. Search-And-Rescue (SAR) is a method of strategic growth: on the basis of an action program developed by conducting an investigation into the dynamics of contemporary city, studioBASAR is acting in the public space as an architectural observation agent. The SAR project is a sum of several analysis and diagnosis chapters, either independent or interrealated, which have been elaborated starting from 2006: Graz the Usual City, Evicting the Ghost – architecture of survival as well as, Bucharest Habitat, Normal in Bucharest, Transfer Brezoianu.
