Bucharest Biennale 5
‘We received neither municipal nor government funding.’ With these words, the co-founder of the Bucharest Biennale, Razvan Ion, opened the press conference. What followed was a statement outlining the almost completely self-organized and subsistent nature of mounting the biennial’s fifth edition. A testament to the haphazard Bucharestian context, the exhibition, curated by Anne Barlow, focused on artistic responses to issues of precariousness and uncertainty. Comprising works made by only 20 artists, ‘Tactics for the Here and Now’ stretched across seven sites dispersed throughout the city – ranging from the University’s Institute for Political Research, an artist-run space, to The House of the Free Press, one of the city’s many landmark Stalinist buildings.
The strength of Barlow’s approach lay in the modest number of invited artists and the itinerant viewing experience of the Biennale. Where dispersal can often dilute an exhibition’s overarching theme, here it provided for sparse solo shows and focused group presentations across context-laden sites. The House of the Free Press provided perhaps the most poignant location. Built in the mid-1950s, it once housed the Party’s official newspaper Scînteia and, as is typical of many post-communist transitional paradoxes, today it is home to most of the Romanian dailies. Scattered inside the former main printing hall were copies of Jill Magid’s Failed States (2012), a ‘non-fiction novel’ that departs from the artist’s witnessing of Fausto Cardenas opening fire on the steps of the Austin State Capitol in 2010. Examining the limits of representations of acts of terror and violence, Failed States was also excerpted in several local magazines.
Truth was likewise suspended in David Maljkovic’s Out of Projection (2009), a two-channel video showing car prototypes tested at the Peugeot headquarters in Sochaux, France. A silent commentary mouthed by now-retired employees accompanied long shots of landscapes and the test-track. Somewhere between documentary and science fiction, the work plays upon the dissonance between the streamlined futurist car prototypes and the aging protagonists. Exhibited alongside was Vesna Pavlovic´’s composite slide projection, Search For Landscapes (2011), consisting of found images of a family’s travels around the world in the 1960s. The faded slides portray the typical familial scenes of pointing, toasting and – uncomfortably for the viewer – posing among the ‘natives’.
Travel landscapes bind Pavlovic´’s work with Haris Epaminonda’s untitled series of Polaroids (2008–09), which comprise tastefully composed panoramas – a palm tree here, a beach vista there – photographed from books. Considering this expression of wanderlust in the context of life under Communism brings to mind the restricted mobility experienced by those behind the Iron Curtain. The melancholic note in this venue was further heightened by the nostalgic media used by Pavlovic´ and Epaminonda – slides and Polaroids – both of which are almost obsolete today.
Marina Albu’s room-sized The Real People’s House (2012) referred directly to one facet of life under Nicolae Ceausescu – recurring power shortages. Candles, battery-powered torches and a gas camping stove were assembled to give light to this domestic interior, which also included a chess set, children’s storybooks and an official pamphlet from 1977 entitled ‘Fundamental Issues of Party and State Activities’. Far from an allegory of a harsh Communist reality, Albu’s installation spoke of familial comfort, moments of pause and pastimes. The Real People’s House is a glimpse into Albu’s faint recollections of growing up in Romania in the 1980s, a childlike perspective on what was simply part of the everyday routine. A more tongue-in-cheek representation of making-do was illustrated in Ciprian Homorodean’s Take the Book, Take the Money, Run! (2010), a manual that outlined pick-pocketing, lock-breaking and shoplifting techniques.
The Bucharest Biennale foregrounded artistic practices that infiltrate and play with expectations of everyday life. In a local restaurant, Ruth Ewan’s A Jukebox of People Trying to Change the World (2003–ongoing) played a collection of more than 2,000 songs addressing issues of gender, power, civil rights and control. Klas Eriksson’s performance Com’on you Reds (2012), however, provided the most dramatic artistic rupturing of Bucharest’s everyday reality. In what must have looked like a fiery blaze to unknowing passersby, Eriksson positioned a team of volunteers equipped with flares to stand on several of the balconies of the Intercontinental Hotel. On cue, they ignited the flares, shrouding the building – once a symbol of the city’s increased openness to the West and a prime terrorist target – in a burning red haze.
‘Tactics for the Here and Now’ was finely attuned to the current debates on the precarious nature of everyday life and labour, the ever-present vocabularies of austerity and uncertainty. However, for a biennial in a context where such issues are paramount, it could have been even more tightly embedded in the local scene. Only two of the artists in the show were Romanian and only one of those continues to reside there. Bearing in mind Bucharest’s rich local art-historical heritage (such as the actions of Ion Grigorescu and Paul Neagu, Andre Cadere’s ‘unlimited paintings’, and the studio actions of Geta Bra˘tescu), the fifth Bucharest Biennale struggled to engage with local artistic responses to the emerging infrastructures and systems it sought to examine.
