Until June 22nd, at Borderline Art Space in Iași, Romania, can be seen another of the "Post-human escapes" projects, co-financed by AFCN and the Austrian Cultural Forum. This time is about Gregor Eldarb and the project called TURBULENCE IN A CHANNEL”, an exbitibion curated by Cristina Moraru, that gathers paintings, graphics and video art. The opening took place on May 17th and we are talking about a project that combine science with art.

"Gregor Eldarb investigates the tensions created around the fluidity of matter, generating turbulence visualizations in water pools and reveling the heterogeneous rhythm of water current and their dynamics. Starting from Friedrich Christian Georg Ahlborn’s research on turbulences which insist on visualizing the active forces involved in moving around a stationary object in wind tunnels, Gregor Eldarb creates a cinematic apparatus consisting of a movable frame supporting a basin containing a mixture of black ink and silver pigment, a monitor installed above the frame in an angular position and a camera that captures the images projected on the basin surface which acts as a liquid mirror.

The flexible frame of the basin allows the liquid to move from left to right, producing a gravitational pendulum effect that generates a multitude of organic shapes on the surface. The basin’s structure also includes metal elements that function as experimental obstacles which generate tensions in the fluidity of the liquid mass, opposing resistance and altering the velocity of the liquid. This creates the turbulences − the fractures, the desynchronizations, the disturbances − that visually describe the nature of liquidity", points out the curator.

"The liquid constitution of modernity (Zygmunt Bauman) establishes the metaphor of fluidity at the foundation of the society organization. The liquid nature understood both, in economic terms − with reference to the circulation of capital − and in sociological terms with regard to the constitution of social relations, allows for a continuous mobility that favors a state of partial autonomy. Liquid matter infiltrates, seeps, flows, changes its course, overflows and inundates, taking control of the space it occupies. However, its autonomy remains partial as long as it depends on the solidity of the structure that contains it.

In a complementary manner, the series of paintings entitled Weird Reflections offers a processual spatial analysis based on the composite study of architectural models, sculptures, texts, words from poems or architectural elements. Approached as inventions of experimental forms, Gregor Eldarb's large-scale paintings visually trace unpredictable reflections, unusual projections and intersections of volumes that transcend the laws of geometry in an imaginary spectacle of the performativity of forms", adds Cristina Moraru.

"Bravaria" is the first solo exhibition of Sofía Torres Kosiba, Argentine artist, and curator, held at the Museo de Arte Moderno de Buenos Aires under the curatorship of Raúl Flores. In Bravaria, an invented kingdom, the Bird Woman reigns, incarnated in Sofía Torres Kosiba, who dialogues with birds, evoking public spaces and the historical past of the ruined statues.

"El Dorado", at the cultural space in the neighborhood of La Boca, presents works and worldviews that expose the problem of natural resource exploitation that America experienced once it was discovered. From installations to videos, golden cobs covered with bullets, tires with golden drawings, and a giant golden potato, these pieces are part of the exhibition that proposes a journey through the colonial past and contemporary works. The group of works questions and proposes reflections for a dialogue located in the four rooms that serve as small passages and drifts.

"El Dorado"

World Press Photo is on world tour again, presenting the world the stories that matter, bringing some of the biggest social and political issues to the fore. Judging of the 2023 World Press Photo Contest took place from 14 January to 24 February 2023 and involved regional juries and a global jury. The regional juries first made a selection of entries per category in their regions, after which the global jury decided on the regional winners, and from those, the global winners.

Presenting the results of the 2023 World Press Photo Contest, the annual exhibition showcases the best and most important photojournalism and documentary photography of the last year. The winners were chosen by an independent jury that reviewed more than 60,448 photographs entered by 3,752 photographers.

“The photographs that we have chosen to represent 2022 are indicative of this moment in time, and will serve as historical documents of what the year was like for future generations to look back on and hopefully learn from,” said 2023 Contest global jury chair Brent Lewis.

“Representing major news events and important moments overlooked by the mainstream media in 2022, the 2023 World Press Photo Contest winning works call attention to some of the most pressing issues facing the world today – from the devastating documentation of the war in Ukraine and historic protests in Iran, to the realities in Taliban-controlled Afghanistan, and the many faces of the climate crisis in countries ranging from Morocco to Australia to Peru to Kazakhstan”, we learn from sources within WPP.

The 24 regional winners and six honorable mentions - covering stories from the front lines of conflict, culture, identity, migration, memories of lost past and glimpses of near and distant futures - were selected by an independent jury out of more than 60,000 entries by 3,752 photographers from 127 countries.

From these, the 2023 Contest jury selected four global winners:

World Press Photo of the Year : Mariupol Maternity Hospital Airstrike by Evgeniy Maloletka, Ukraine, Associated Press;

World Press Photo Story of the Year : The Price of Peace in Afghanistan - Mads Nissen, Denmark, Politiken/Panos Pictures;

World Press Photo Long-Term Project Award : Battered Waters - Anush Babajanyan, Armenia, VII Photo/National Geographic Society;

World Press Photo Open Format Award : Here, The Doors Don't Know Me - Mohamed Mahdy, Egypt.

The annual World Press Photo Contest, representing major news events and important moments overlooked by the mainstream media, recognizes and celebrates the best photojournalism and documentary photography produced over the last year. To offer a more global and better geographic balance of perspectives, the World Press Photo Foundation launched a regional strategy last year, changing the set-up of the annual contest and the judging.

World Press Photo is on a mission to connect the world to the less-explored stories, rendered as they actually are, through visuals.

Between April 20 and 30, 2023, the Art Museum in Cluj-Napoca, Romania, presented a unique artistic project - a site-specific intervention in the Bánffy Palace, signed by Andrei Budescu, and curated by Alexandra Sârbu.

The artist proposed a site-specific multimedia installation, “[UNSEEN: Subjective Itineraries”, put into a dynamic dialog with the fine art decorations of the honor wing of the Bánffy Palace and some iconic artworks exhibited in the “National Gallery”.

“The museum is a space full of meaning and significance, where you can experience an amazing journay of discovery. The act of active observation intertwines with the personal experiences and memories of each look generating a complex experience in which there are no rules, but only the possibility of being surprised. And thus, a visit to a museum, brings together perception, reflection and emotion, (re)awakening in us the amazement that seduces…”, we learn from curator Alexandra Sârbu.

The artist was supported in the implementation of the project by a technical team consisting of Sebastian Zanga and Dan Tămaş. The artistic project was realized with the logistical support of the Photo-Video-Digital Image Processing Department (FVPCI) within the University of Art and Design in Cluj-Napoca (UAD).

CREATIVE PHOTOGRAPHY WORKSHOP

On April 26, the site-specific intervention was the “host and the generating nucleus of a creative photography workshop that probed the dimensions of the ephemerality of the moving image and the effect pf the reversed mirroring of our passage through time and space, undermining and restructuring the naturalness of the historical flow”, we learn from sources within the museum.

Thanks to a series of “artist & curator talks” meetings, the visitors to the exhibition have had the opportunity to go behind the scenes of the creation process involved in producing the site-specific intervention, discovering a series of interesting details about the conceptual stake, the sources of inspiration, the received influences and the significance of the whole approach.

APPLIED LESSON

A group of undergraduate students from the first and second year of study, bachelor’s degree, Faculty of History and Philosophy within the “Babeş-Bolyai” University (UBB), majoring in “History of Art”, accompanied by the Phd. university lecturer Voica Puşcaşiu, had the opportunity, on April 27, to meet and dialogue with the initiator and curator of the artistic project, Alexandra Sârbu, the visit to the exhibition facilitating, in addition to an “inside” look at the entire process of imagining and building the site-specific multimedia art installation, an in-depth understanding of the motivations behind these creative practices (site-specific interventions), both exciting and challenging, increasingly frequently staged by the great western museums.

CONTEMPORARY DANCE WORKSHOP

The event was associated with the 2023 edition of the International Dance Day, it took place on April 29, 2023, and the participants in the activity were students of the Choreography and Dramatic Art High School "Octavian Stroia" from Cluj-Napoca.

Based on a guided improvisation, the contemporary dance workshop was adapted to the ambience of the exhibition-site-specific intervention, the training session being coordinated by contemporary dance expert and teacher, Loredana Crăciun, in collaboration with Alexandra Sârbu, museographer and curator of the exhibition.

The finishing of the exhibition took place on Friday, April 28, in the presence of the artist and the curator.

Andrei Budescu, a Romanian visual artist, is an Assistant Lecturer at the University of Art and Design in Cluj-Napoca, where he teaches History of Photography and Multimedia at the Photo-Video and Processed Image Department. He has participated in a number of artist residencies and workshops in Romania, USA and India. The artist uses different cameras for his processes.

Andrei Budescu has been fascinated by cameras and photography since childhood. Over the last 10 years he has been experimenting with different photographic processes (Polaroid, Wet Plate Collodion) and different cameras (4x5, 5x7, 8x10 cameras). 

Photo credits © Andrei Budescu

"La Era del Peluche" (The Plush Era) is a solo exhibition by Argentine artist Gerónimo Damián Araquistain at the Cultural Center San Martin, located in Buenos Aires. The proposal revolves around a series of large-sized Spanish plush playing cards, whose objective is to offer an analysis of the significance of Spanish playing cards in our society and especially in Latin America.

Participating Artist: 

Gerónimo Araquistain 

Borderline Art Space, art gallery in Iași, presents an exhibition of drawing, poetry and video entitled "Forest Creatures", by artist Laura Partin, opened on April 12. Curated by Simona Vilău, the exhibition can still be viewed by phone reservation until May 11, 2023.

Performers Alice Monica Marinescu, Cabiria Morgenstern and cameramen Mihai Florea, Marcel Trifan were involved in the project, and the music was provided by Fetter (Jessica Tucker, new media artist and musician).

"Being a project both lived and imagined, Forest Creatures includes works of drawing, poetry and video, apparently incompatible. The correlation came naturally during the work. Trained as a graphic artist in Iași, in a school with respect for drawing, Laura Partin feels the need to perfect herself, to expand her area of interest for mediums and to always experiment with other ways of creating", we learn from Simona Vilău.

"The artist relies on the difference between the work in the workshop and its intimacy and the finished work, the exhibition, the message. She also relies on the complementary forces that arise from the text and from working with the camera, two other mediums she used in the realization of this project.

How many Laura Partins do we meet in this exhibition? At least four, projected into a room of mirrors. The pandemic helped her reformulate her goals and propose the same theme treated with the help of four different mediums: drawing with illustrative, magical-poetic notes, the video-performance with an ecological theme, the feminist poetry already contained in a volume published by The frACTalia publishing house and the theoretical work on the project, with explanatory notations and autobiographical references.

The creatures of the forest are a metaphor for transformation and suffering. The fear behind the suffering is immortalized in the portraits of innocent little girls, each lost in her own fairy tale world, populated by insects, fabulous characters and an apparent hardening of the self.

The ecological theme completes the experience and translates it into a worrying present, of global warming and climate change. Being aware of it or not, humanity has recently gone through at least three major episodes of humanitarian crisis, mediatized and experienced in an oversaturated digital collective", pointed out the curator.

Laura Partin is a contemporary artist born in Iasi, now living in Bucharest, who explores drawing techniques such as pencil on paper, watercolor and Chinese ink on canvas, but also uses performance (sometimes participatory), installation or video art. She studied Fine Arts, Art History and Theory at "George Enescu" National University of Arts in Iași, and between 2012-2014 she had a scholarship in Fine Arts at the Romanian Cultural Institute in Venice. In 2021, she obtained a PhD in Fine Arts at the University of Paris. Over the years, Laura has tackled topics such as gender stereotypes, the condition of migrant workers and concepts from social psychology such as cognitive dissonance or terror management theory. Her most recent project, Sfratto/Eviction (2020), exhibited in Rome, incorporated a video and a series of drawings about the eviction of Roma families from their homes in Romania between 2010 and 2020. Most recently, in the context of the pandemic, she became interested in the multimedia/performative potential of contemporary feminist poetry and time spent in nature as a form of introspective healing.

The exhibition is organized by Borderline Art Space through the AltIași Cultural Association and is part of the "Post-Human Escapes" project, co-financed by AFCN.

"Día de Campo" (Field Day) is a solo exhibition by visual artist Iosu Aramburu at Pasto Gallery in Buenos Aires. Iosu's work includes paintings that explore modernism in the Andean region, named after the area over the Andes Mountains and comprising a large part of South America, usually marginalized in the history of Latin American art. The avant-garde and the South American countryside dialogue in this proposal can be visited in the heart of the autonomous city of Buenos Aires.

Recently, at ArtEast Gallery Iasi, took place the opening of a new exhibition signed by artist Felix Aftene. The project presents 50 of his works, made in the serigraphy technique. The curatorial statement is signed by Dana Lungu, and presents aspects related to the artistic practice and concepts of the artist.

"In the present exhibition, Felix Aftene's challenge is in relation to serigraphy. He takes a 4000-year-old technique, which he appropriates, tests its limits, adapts it, domesticates it, polishes it like a lens through which he looks back at his own work. Selecting from the old cycles of reference works - the central character from Dali's Mustache, the idols and mythological characters from Falling in Time, the nudes and chimeras from Genesis, etc., Felix Aftene translates them into a new technical dimension, with new plastic vibrations. He thus rediscovers his own artistic path, the stages of creation and urges us to visit it in a different light. The exhibition is a real self-portrait of the author in serigraphy, because Felix Aftene never forgets his deep belief in the immortality of the figurative art and painting.

Beyond the self-referential stake, the exhibition is a tour in the aestheticization of a technique which, we must not forget, at its origins is a technique of multiplication. Of course, the present artist is neither the first nor the only one who undertakes the effort to ennoble the serigraphy technique, but the personal way in which he does it, the technical difficulties he overcomes, the complexity he reaches and the transition from the "graphic" effect to which is commonly assumed by the serigraphy to the effect of <<pictoriality>>, that Felix Aftene manages to achieve, gives it a special status, a privileged place in the history of this technique", stated the curator.

And the artist added: " (...) It is the first complete personal exhibition in this technique and I am convinced that it represents, from the point of view of exposure, only the beginning for me. And that's because serigraphy can't be limited to a millennial past, but will surely enrich its present and future forever, as long as passion, quality and the desire to create stories with the help of art are gathered in them".

FELIX AFTENE works in Iasi, but is known for a sustained artistic activity on the romanian and also the international art scene, in various artistic mediums, such as painting, sculpture, mural painting and new media. In 1996, he graduated Mural Painting from "George Enescu" Academy of Arts in Iasi. Since 2013, he is the president of the Iași Branch of the Union of Visual Artists in Romania.

In 2016, he obtained his PhD in Visual Arts at the "George Enescu" National University of Arts, with a thesis dedicated to contemporary visual arts. He had more than 40 personal exhibitions in museums and international art galleries in Austria, USA, Great Britain, Greece, Germany, Switzerland, France, Italy, Spain, Canada, Denmark, Hungary, Israel, and has various artistic distinctions.