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Launched in 2010, The Ark is a contemporary conversion of a building belonging to Bucharest heritage of industrial architecture, known as The Bucharest Customs Warehouses and Commodity Exchange in 1898. It was the Italian architect Giulio Magni’s achievement, with assistance from engineer Anghel Saligny, a project that represented more than 110 years ago the connection of Romania to European stock market. The Ark is currently reformulating the concept proposing to the public values that are stemming from the creative production. Activating the resources of a mix of well-known communication, advertising and architecture companies, as well as contemporary art projects, The Ark is looming for the public in Bucharest as a multidisciplinary scene of public events: exhibitions, concerts, performing shows, fashion shows, fairs, workshops, etc.
Urban Transition / MULTI_PLI_CITY
19:00 - 04:00exhibition
artists: Michele Bressan, Alexandra Croitoru, Regele Ionescu, Iosif Kiraly, Luminitza Cochinescu Liboutet, Andrei Mateescu, STUDIOBASAR (Alex Axinte & Cristi Borcan), Roxana Trestioreanu
curator: Irina Cios
The project invites the public to a meeting with eight works of contemporary photography proposed by artists living and working in Bucharest. Recognized as a legitimate artistic medium after `90, photography has established itself as one of the most active creative fields. The exhibition Urban Transitions / MULTI_PLI_CITATE offers an overview of current trends in the Romanian creation, which focuses on reflecting the urban context. Bringing together different views and personalities, whose approach focuses on photography, the project illustrates the diversity of meanings generated by the landscape of Bucharest with all its peculiarities resulting from the recent past fresh footprint.
The city today is a continuum in constant expansion and retreat. Current urban context is the main frame for the visual culture. Through interest in researching the contemporary city, the visual artists are participating within an interdisciplinary communication platform together with architects, urbanists, ideologists, sociologists and philosophers.
The city is an image as well as a path of continuity between inside and outside, between private and public, between architecture and nature, logic and emotion, preservation and waste, legal and fraud, reflection and spontaneity, "high class" and "common". It involves the individual into a perpetual dynamic process of transformation, an individual who is part of an urban and social context defined not through identity but through difference.
The urban image is a pocket picture. It reveals and conceals, gives access both to the interior and exterior linking additional resorts. It defines the frame of multiple identities assumed by contemporary individual that is simoultaneously related to different spatio-temporal realities.
Recent past, intimacy, time-image, icon, alterity, mobility, re-construction are some of the suggested reading keys. Dialogue between generations contributes to the diversity of viewpoints.
Michele Bressan explores the recent history persistence in the quotidian. Alexandra Croitoru offers an insight into the relationship between cultural production and consumerism through the written media. King Ionescu plays with time decomposing a cinematic base through a remediation process. Iosif Kiraly is linking memory-images that articulate in several time resorts. Luminitza Cochinescu Liboutet calls for a crossing of all the sensations, tastes, desires, emotions generated by urban life. Through digital manipulation, Andrei Mateescu proposes a utopic appropriation of communist architectural heritage applying an amputation process which points out the alienating spirit of collective housing. Studiobasar (Alex Axinte & Cristi Borcan) proposes an interdisciplinary approach bringing into question the paradoxical situations resulting from the application of law on the restoration of law regime of housing ownership. Roxana Trestioreanu proposal brings into question the femininity and the charm and seduction of the universe redefined in terms of active life which is driven by efficiency and responsability.
Urban Transitions / MULTI_PLI_CITATE calls for understanding Bucharest as a city that is part of a global dynamic.
Note: The exhibition was made as part of the e-CITES Bucarest, general curator Dimitri Konstantinidis, initiated by Apollonia Association Strasbourg and conducted in partnership with the Romanian Cultural Institute during November-December 2010, in several locations in Strasbourg. The project included several types of activities and curatorial/ exhibition proposals. After Strasbourg the e-CITES Bucarest project traveled at the Museum of Modern Art Saint Etienne, France (10.12.2011 - 05.02.2012) and Walon Center for Contemporary Art, Flemalle, Belgium (11.02 - 11.03.2012). The photo exhibition is offered the first time to the Romanian public on this occasion.