The Art Encounters Foundation launches a residency program dedicated to the young artists, to take place in 2017. Its purpose is to stimulate creativity, encourage the exploration of artistic practices in collaboration with the local artistic environment, facilitate cultural exchange, and establish a vivid, meaningful dialogue between the communities and actors from different cultural fields.
Given the recent appointment of Timișoara as European Capital of Culture 2021 and the organization in 2017 of the second edition of the Timișoara Art Encounters biennial, Timișoara is on the right track for becoming a major focus point of the national and regional artistic interest. The rich cultural calendar announced by the program proposed for 2021, with national and cross-border exchanges and cultural mobilities, is based on creating bridges across cities, people and domains, capable of sustaining the long-term cultural development of the city. At the same time, the Art Encounters biennial, which will take place between September 30 and November 5, 2017, will comprise a series of exhibitions focused on Romanian Contemporary Art, lectures and workshops, and will be preceded in the spring and summer months by an intense activity of research carried out in Timișoara by invited curators and artists.
The artist-in-residence program founded by the Art Encounters Foundation aims to become a permanent platform for experiments, production and dialogue for young Romanian artists.
The artists who participated in the 2015 Art Encounters residency program are: Bogdan Armanu & Silvia Amancei, Biroul de Cercetări Melodramatice (Irina Gheorghe and Alina Popa), Mihut Boșcu-Kafchin, Alex Mirutziu.
Residency program calendar:
The duration of each residency is of minimum 5 weeks and maximum 12 weeks.
The benefits of the residency program
During the residency program, the Art Encounters Foundation will provide:
Eligibility and requirements
The age limit for applicants is 40 years.
During the residency period, the artist must spend at least 80% of his/her time in Timișoara. If the proposed project requires travelling for research outside Timișoara, amendments to the above requirement can be made.
How to apply and selection process
For January – March 2017 and April-July 2017, the period for submitting the application starts on October 10, 2016 and closes on November 30, 2016.
The dates for the September-November session will be announced later on.
The applications shall be sent by email, at contact@artencounters.ro, and must contain the following attachments:
The residency program can accommodate only one artist at a time in each of the mentioned periods.
The resident will be selected by the Artistic Board of the Foundation, whose members are: Magda Radu (curator and art historian), Dan Perjovschi (artist), Cosmin Haiaș (artist), Cristina Olteanu (Executive Director of the Foundation) and Ovidiu Șandor (President of the Art Encounters Foundation).
The selection process focuses both on the submitted project – the rigor of the artistic concept and the chosen method to put it into practice, and the applicant’s previous experience and the way in which he/she could benefit from the residency program.
Selection results
Following the review of the applications, Raluca Croitoru, a young artist living and working in Bucharest and Rotterdam, was chosen to be the artist in residence during January-March, 2017. Raluca has a Bachelor Degree in Dynamic Image and Photography at the National University of Arts Bucharest (2013) and she holds a Master Cum Laude degree in Fine Arts at the Piet Zwart Institute, Rotterdam (2016).
Her project for the residency program intends to combine elements from the official scoring systems for dance with information gathered from contemporary statistics in order to investigate, in a performative manner, work and leisure in today’s society. The theoretical part, in which the artist will conduct her research starting from the dance manuals published in the 16-18th century in Europe, will be completed by a practical application, as explained by Raluca: “I’m interested in observing and translating participatory, small social actions, that we perform in everyday life and that lie at the basis of global economic systems. Experienced directly, either by observers or by participants, they represent contemporary forms of social dance.”
The results of the selection for the April-June 2017 artist-in-residence program will be announced by the end of February.
Mihuț Boșcu-Kafchin
5 August – September 2015
My subjects are barriers that keep Nothingness at bay, an illusion on which I work day after day, belief in magic or science, a rampart, the same as metempsychosis, but separated by the romantic filter through which I view things.
The Art Encounters residency provides me with a new outlook on Timişoara, and the innovative spirit of the city inspires me. Technology is humankind’s second nature; the Internet flavours our present age. My practice is based on technological, medical, astronomical innovations, and Timişoara in its turn plays a part in the IT crescendo, and this is why I experience the city in a fraternal way. To me it counts that I am in the company of wonderful people who are actively contributing to the construction of a solid, stable arts ecosystem in Romania, and being part of this landscape is a privilege.
Alex Mirutziu
4 July – October 2015
In Art Encounters, Mirutziu adheres to the curator’s concept with works that point out the duty to clarify our context. As artist in residence in Timisoara, he continues his research entitled Revenge of Architecture or When I build I’m Right – which will be publicly presented during Art Encounters.
Bogdan Armanu & Silvia Amancei
June 2015
„Sexy-History Calendar” series is an ongoing project which started to developed in 2014 and it consists in the making of thematic sexy-picture calendars. We started from the premise that as artists, our practice should be useful for the society and a calendar seemed to be the perfect choice as it is a tool to maintain the sense of time. We also wanted to share our limited knowledge and political subjectivity with the others, therefore the medium of the sexy-picture calendar provided an effective support for that.
The first chapter of this series (2015 a sexy-history calendar) focused on the forms of the socialist struggles of the past centuries, the movement of capital in the fields of politics and the development of the global market and its repercussions.
During our research stay in Timișoara, we worked for the materialization of a new chapter (2016 a sexy-history calendar / Timișoara / movement in the labour market) this time creating a site specific narration for the 2016 calendar, exploring the movement within the local labor market, before and after the fall of socialism.
The Bureau of Melodramatic Research (Irina Gheorghe, Alina Popa)
Weather forecast project
September – October 2015
Their most recent project is a performance and film trilogy taking the form of TV instructional shows also performed as live sessions, which is a reflection on alienating effects and affects of the current economy. The first two parts of the project are Protect Your Heart at Work, a safety training for the post-fordist emotional workplace (Technical Museum Warsaw, 2012) and Lovegold: Contemporary Alchemy, a cosmic cooking show which does not start or end with the human element (bak Utrecht, 2013; MNAC Bucharest, 2014).
During the residency in Timișoara, BMR will work on the third part of the trilogy, a weather forecast playing with one of melodrama’s central characteristics: the emotional charge of its characters pitted against nature. The broader context of global warming and climate change recasts emotions as alien forces coming from the nonhuman realm as uncontrollable demonic possession: a simple breath starts a new climate, a whirl of thought, a cyclone while drops of tears gather in dubious waste ponds.
Alina Șerban
research on Sigma work
15 July – September
The theme reflected upon within the framework of Art Encounters is the place of the Sigma group on the map of contemporary art. Alina Şerban has begun to map the group’s presence, and the exhibition she will present is a preliminary response, the result of a multi-layered study, which included dialogue with local researchers (Andreea Flondor), as well as comparison with other curators from different cultural media (Space Caviar).
