Decontextualization of a Delocalization.
Critical Meaning of the Photographic Image Exhibited by the Vector Association from Iași at the Turn of a New Millennium
Places are located between distances, making them invisible or, in some circumstances, forgotten. In certain historical fractures, places sink and seem to disappear from the face of the earth. When the silence grows longer and longer, no one is interested in listening. But there are situations where one need not travel to find out. Because imagination can be ignited out of nowhere.
The future should in no way be invoked. It is not in the future that anything happens today, even the remembrance of a disappearance. Whether we can live on questions is for each of us to experience. Perhaps what matters is the historical survival of meaning’s critical constitution. And that means that a context was once possible in which things were arranged differently, through a twist of situation brought about by circumstances of digression from what was generally accepted.
Here are a few moments collateral to the prevailing way of conjuring up cultural facts relevant to the artistic community in Iași around the 2000s. I would not consider the protocol of a historical account that would also involve a socio-cultural analysis of the moment of divergence from one millennium to the next, but rather I would point out some of the instances of photography use by virtue of a critical differentiation.
One can refer to the shaping of production modes for a strategic series of critical micro-contexts, in a predominantly traditionalist and conservative context that was then constantly malignized, covering up most of the spaces of opportunity and visibility that would have offered a chance for convergence with the emancipatory expectations shaped in the golden era of organizing an international biennial of contemporary art in Iași in 2003-2008.
Such a critical micro-context, with the characteristic of de-localization and connection to contemporary cultural practices with potential progressive implications, was constituted through the Vector Association’s organization of the first edition of the Periferic Contemporary Art Biennial in Iași in 2003, generated by putting together five previous editions of the Periferic Contemporary Art Festival, initiated under the artistic direction of artist and cultural manager Matei Bejenaru.
Swedish curator and diplomat Anders Kreuger was appointed curator of the 2003 Periferic Biennial of Contemporary Art, the 6th recurring event built on the foundations of five editions of a performance and contemporary art festival. Having come into contact with the Romanian realities and, in particular, with the status of material and symbolic life in Iași, trying to anticipate a possible change in the conditions of coexistence in the near future, Anders Kreuger was inspired by a passage from Walter Benjamin’s Berlin Childhood around 1900, and entitled his curatorial project “Prophetic Corners”. In his exhibition rationale, Kreuger speaks of the symbolic quality of a place that would have the power to foretell the future, a different kind of future than that prescribed by external conditioning. In his own words, on the one hand, Kreuger realized the necessity of invoking an “antidote” against melancholic obsessions with the past, presenting the future as a condition that could move thinking away from context, and on the other hand, he questioned the inhibition of the potential for emancipation from the paradigm of accepting a form of self-isolation within the periphery.
One of the projects presented during the biennial, at the Palace of Culture in Iași was by Dutch artist Dré Wapenaar, who installed a tent and a photographic documentation with different formats of tents manufactured according to his own design and hung from trees or lifted from the ground with stilts and ladders, similar to space shuttles, with different meanings generated by their free and utopian use, like a tent specially designed for mothers who want to give birth far away from the urban bustle. His tents are made of textile, steel and wood, mobilizing labor relations extrapolated later through a meditation on human relationships and different situations of both use and poeticization. While Dré Wapenaar’s sculptures define spaces of shelter and separation, constructing, for example, a pavilion to protect a piano or the roof of a bicycle bridge, the photographs installed in the exhibition space could be seen more as an extension of the sculptural forms rather than a dry and adjoining documentation, combining the idea of alternative dwelling with the environments in which the tents were erected.
During the same biennale, Icelandic artist and writer Thorvaldur Thorsteinsson (who sadly has since passed away), proposed a social engagement project by conducting a series of interviews with 13 teenagers from Iași, trying to find answers about their future prospects. Subsequently, the artist made a series of portrait photographs, printing a series of posters, like those made by the authorities for wanted people, which he multiplied and spread in public spaces in the city, causing consternation, amusement, and questioning.
With an archaeological and futurological interest to scan hidden layers of the city’s social history and to envision new ways of living under the pressure of new ideologies that were already drawing directions of simplifying life in a conservative-nationalist-isolationist spectrum, the 2006 edition of the Periferic International Biennial of Contemporary Art in Iași, which had already started with a series of pre-exhibition events in 2005, was entitled Periferic 7: Focussing Iași. A first section of the biennale was curated by Marius Babias and Angelika Nollert (both from Germany), under the title “Social Processes”, questioning the quality of a social space to continuously self-generate its political and cultural meaning through productive inter-relation. From the perspective of the curatorial critique of economic and cultural capitalism, Babias and Nollert argued that social structures and actions should not be seen as configurations reflecting the homogenization of behaviors according to a dominant social mono-culture, but should be in a permanent process of relating to reality through the way in which diverse social relations function. Art would have this quality of investigating, utilizing and initiating “social processes” in the sense of a continuous collective interweaving of the social fabric.
In this section of the biennial, Hito Steyerl (in collaboration with Boris Buden) made a visual analysis of the interaction between the triumphant symbolism of political power and the underlying message of sculptural representations in the public space, photographically documenting the Independence Monument in Iași, carved by Gabriela Manole Adoc (with bas-reliefs on its plinth by the artist’s husband, Gheorghe Adoc) and inaugurated in 1980 under Nicolae Ceaușescu’s regime. According to the authors, the meaning of a monument could be constructed on the basis of a mathematical operation of adding together values linked to a way of doing politics after the fall of history. Starting from the photographic identification of the text inscribed on the monument’s plinth: “Independence is the sum of our historical life” M. Eminescu, Steyerl visually breaks the monument into several progressive composites by photographing fragments of the monument from several positions and angles, thus deriving that “The cinematic image is the sum of inert images”.
In another photographic installation project presented at this edition of the biennale, Luchezar Boyadjiev documented the megalomaniacal modes of advertising representation that dominated urban public space at that time, in a mixture of visual languages of globalist colonization with spontaneous localist reactions. Life in the multitude of cities developed on the neo-capitalist principles of a dysfunctional relationship between the nature of mass visual advertising and the intimate individuality of desire would be in a continuous process of negotiation. In his photographic exploration of Iași, contrasted with images from other cities, Boyadjiev observes the same chronological stratification of architecture, but he notes a unique characteristic, the expression of a national identity functionality that has not been reflected in reality since Iași lost its status as the capital city of a nation-state.
Another perspective on the city can be found in the project Everything | Synchronization by Finnish artist Laura Horelli, published in the catalogue of the exhibition “Social Processes” at Periferic 7. Based on two poems written during the Ceaușescu dictatorship by Ana Blandiana and Marin Sorescu, which survived uncensored, Horelli’s work meditates on the relationship between a series of photographs and texts, on poetry as a popular form of protest from the perspective of metaphorical language that can veil reality, and exposes its own poetic perception of the relationship between the history and urban actuality of Iași, experienced through conversations and walks with some of the locals involved in the organization and production of the Periferic event.
Meanwhile, American artist John Miller has expanded his series of photographs The Middle of the Day with images of Iași. This series was initiated in 1994 documenting, with a medium format or a digital camera, daily life on Canal Street in New York, where the artist had his studio. His artistic documentation was then extended to other cities, photographing streets in the middle of the day, between 12-14, when presumably people are on break from work. For Miller, this non-time represented a poetic suspension of capitalism’s exploitative process. It is well known that the photographic images were methodically processed, then printed as a master copy for the artist, a copy for the exhibition and a back-up copy. In certain exhibition contexts, this series of over 1000 photographs was also presented as a slide-show on a flat screen.
The latter section of the biennial, entitled “Strategies of Learning”, was curated by Florence Derieux (France), then curator at the Musée Cantonal des Beaux-Arts in Lausanne, and sought to investigate the experience of learning in a new world for travelers from the West. The biennale also featured a documentary installation by American artist Sean Snyder, who investigated the condition of capitalist culture’s simulacra of status consumption by illustrating businessman Ilie Alexandru’s 1992-1994 reproduction of the Southfork farm from the American TV series Dallas on the property of one of his farms in Slobozia, Hermesland.
The last edition of the contemporary art biennial, Periferic 8, was built around the curatorial concept of art as a gift, proposed by Dóra Hegyi (Hungary). Here, the act of giving was presented as a relational model between art and its public generated by the diversity of (primarily symbolic) transactions between individuals. As a form of an alternative economy, the social practice of gift-giving is situated at the outer periphery of the market economy ideology. From this presumption, supported by behavioral observations, one can describe new forms of art economy that value the transactions of ideas in contrast to the mercantile appreciation of the pre-eminence of understanding art as a commodity. In this sense, the exhibitions were functionalized with mediums of presenting a background of research and knowledge exchange.
One of the photographic projects exhibited at this edition of the biennale belonged to artist Tatiana Fiodorova from the Republic of Moldova, who captured in a series of documentary art images the manifestation of an atypical form of economic exchange, revealing the absurdity of labor relations and the supra-social symbolism of a way of survival. In a train station, the inhabitants of a small town where a toy factory was operating received the products they had made instead of their wages, and were thus in a position to trade them with train passengers in order to earn money.
Taking all of this into consideration, it becomes evident that photography constructs diversities and variations in ways of seeing and involves traversing situations that can be understood as commonplaces, but which, in different contexts, can be subject to forces of overturning, twisting or altering, moving beyond the realm of measurement and limitation. Places have their own meaning, regardless of ignoring or forgetting them, and are illuminated by those who traverse them because they dislocate themselves from time to follow the gaze, its inquisitiveness.
– text Cătalin Gheorghe
– translation Marina Oprea
