Because We Navigate on Different Lanes
8 May – 12 July 2014
Salonul de proiecte (MNAC Anexa, Bucharest, Romania)
Artists: Cristina Amelia Candea, Vlad Basalici, Madalina Lazar, Szilárd Miklós, Veda Popovici
Because we navigate on different lanes is the
second exhibition of the current season to present proposals selected following
open calls aimed at encouraging young artists active as part of Romania’s
contemporary art scene. This time, the selection of works produced especially
for the occasion was carried out by the Little
Warsaw duo from Budapest (artists András Gálik and Bálint
Havas).
For Vlad Basalici,
a historical event cannot be pinned down within time in order to create a
coherent narrative; what is preserved is an accumulation of moments, of
micro-events that refuse to be connected with each other. Cristina
Amelia Cândea puts forward a video installation that
attempts to elucidate what occurs when “the zero moment of creation” arises.
Spontaneous interactions with various objects translate into a series of
impulses that cannot be framed within any concept. In the case of Mădălina
Lazăr, the starting point is a work by Gerrit van Bakel,
entitled Tarim Machine, first exhibited at Documenta 7 in Kassel in 1981, her
own work forming an extended meditation on movement within space, a movement
that is conceptualised as an exercise in endurance and patience. Veda
Popovici is preoccupied with the issue of the migration
of Romanian citizens to various parts of the world; she reflects on the
condition of citizens who have no real status in the societies where they make
their living, proposing an exercise that activates ethical conscience, designed
to lead to an awareness of the huge difficulties confronting this social
category. Szilárd Miklós brings to our
attention an important landmark of Romanian contemporary art from the 90s – the
performance festival from Lake Sf. Ana, a chapter too little revisited in the
last years, here being approached from the angle of the difficulties which
arise through attempts of historicising this moment from the present perspective.
In a period when a significant part of
Romanian society has come to perceive visual art (if it perceives it at all)
solely as a market product, when institutions that play a major cultural and
educational role lend their support to art markets where dissonant promotion,
jumbled registers, the validation of false reference points, and the
instrumentalisation of art for commercial ends is unequivocally asserted, in
such a context contemporary art that wagers on critical reflection, which
claims an educational dimension for itself, which is deliberately
non-spectacular, which prefers to question and to doubt, marks out a marginal
place for itself, constructing for itself an identity separate from the
non-productive and troublesome rhetoric that monopolises the public space.
Unfortunately, even in this niche of contemporary art, the discourse is more
often than not simplistic and focused on the spectacular, as institutional
performance is today evaluated in terms of the number of visitors, or else it
is opportunistic and calculated, wagering on the institution’s international
image, all of which is to the detriment of the production of content and the
establishment of a real relationship with the public and the local artistic
scene. In this part of the year, events such as Art Safari, Galleries/Museums
Night, and the Bucharest Biennale have forced us to re-evaluate once more the
local context within which we operate and to re-affirm, via this
exhibition, Salonul de proiecte‘s
commitment to supporting the critical art produced by the local scene.
During the period of the exhibition,
the Little Warsaw duo of artists
will give a presentation of their artistic practice and Veda
Popovici will organise a public debate that will be
accompanied by a reader containing various personal accounts, studies and
strategies connected with the topic of migration. Details of the events are to
be announced.
Salonul de proiecte is a curatorial program
initiated by Magda Radu and Alexandra Croitoru functioning within MNAC
Anexa. This program envisages the organization of exhibitions,
presentations and debates focusing upon Romanian contemporary art and placing
young artists’ productions into a broader generational context.Waiting for The Tarim Machine to Come
This is a project about patience and slow-motion. It is a motion
produced so slowly that it seems to be integrated in nature, becoming a part of
it.
The starting point of
this project is the work of Gerrit van Bakel, Tarim Machine, made
between 1979 and 1980 and exhibited for the first time at the Documenta 7
in Kassel, in 1981. This work, like many of his other machines, is
designed according to his Day and Night Principle. Relying on the differences
in temperature (between day and night or the hot/cold cycle), the motion is
generated by the expansion and contraction of the materials used in making the
machine. In this case, the Tarim Machine would travel at 18mm per day and it
was planned to cross the Tarim Basin in Tibet, which is about 1100 km wide. According
to him the machine will cover a distance of
approximately 1060 km over the course of 36,000,000 years.
Actually Van Bakel made an odd miscalculation (or exaggeration), because
with a speed of 18 mm per day it would only take 170000 years to cover 1100 km.
Theoretically, the Blue Flame rocket
– produced in 1970 – would be able to cross the Tarim Basin in one hour, while
according to Van Bakel's calculations the Tarim Machine would need more than 30
million years to cross it. It is typical for van
Backel's works to seamlessly combine aspects
form recent history - especially those related to
innovations in technology and physics - with
moments taken from his personal background. Tarim Machine is actually an
artistic response to the Blue Flame rocket. The Blue Flame was the rocket-powered
vehicle driven by Gary Gabelich that achieved the world land speed record on
Bonneville Salt Flats in Utah on October 23, 1970, clocking 622,407 mph
(1.001,667 km/h), a record which lasted until October 1983.
I came across Gerrit van Bakel's works by
various and often subjective ways of tracking the evolution of a technical
element in arts, which metaphorically is called a "machine" or
"machinery". Aside from the kinetic objects whose obvious purpose was
to create motion, I discovered that van Bekel's attraction towards science also
had other roots. His subjects come from science, recent history and his own
personal past experiences. They also stem from his understanding of the
connection that binds culture and nature, raw material and the technological
object, the physical part of things and their metaphysical aspect, life and
death. His machines do generate motion, but that's not their main purpose: it
is to produce consciousness.
I don’t know if van Bakel’s machine
is working or has ever worked perfectly. He accepted
to be dependent on forces over which he can not have complete control,
therefore the outcome might be unpredictable.
His work made me want to subject the
viewer of my exhibition to an exercise of patience. I have create my own route
for Gerrit van Beckel's machine, a route of 1837 km which crosses the Tarim
Basin through these cities: Kashgar, Aksu, Kuka, Korla, Turpan and Hami, in
northwest China. In this case, the Tarim Machine will reach its destination in
approximately 280,000 years, 279,604.263 to be more precise. This imaginary
road will follow the old Silk Road through the desert.
The project consists of a series of 6 drawings on Betonyp concrete slabs,
60x80 cm each (I), a 159 minutes
long animation in a 4:3 format,
displayed on six monitors 8 inches in diagonal (II) and a 30x40cm map, silkscreen on silk (III).
(I) The six drawings are depicting images relevant to the cities inside the
Tarim Basin (scenery elements, architectural structures, etc.) which recreate –
resembling something like a rite of passage – the itinerary of van Bakel’s Machine
through the Tarim Basin, crossing the cities of Kashgar (the Kashi railway
station), Aksu (apartment blocks), Kuka (the Kucha mosque), Korla (terraces on
top of apartment blocks), Turpan (grape drying shacks) and Hami (the tombs of Islamic
kings).
The choice of the cities through which the
Tarim machine would pass was completely spontaneous. After randomly choosing my
first three cities on a map in the northwest of China, I found out they were
also part of the ancient Silk Road. This coincidence was a very favorable
accident that I really felt I could use at that time and it gave me great deal
of joy. It was the moment I decided to follow the same route and so the next
three cities were chosen accordingly.
(II) The animation depicts a moving dot, a mobile objects representing
Gerrit van Bakel's Tarim Machine which covers the 1,837 kilometres of my chosen
route through northwest China, following the ancient Silk Road. The moving
object has the shape of a square, mimicking the aspect of a pixel (in reality,
it is 7 by 7 pixels). It follows the route by moving one unit every minute thus
covering the total distance of 159 units in two hours and 38 minutes. No matter
how much I would have liked to test the viewer's patience, it would have been
impossible to have him wait for 279.604 years (because Van Bakel s Tarim
Machine moves with 18 mm per day), so one minute of my animations equals
918,499,140 minutes of real time.
I needed the simplest of animations because the
more basic a structure is, the more durable it becomes. When I began working on
it, I remembered Theo Jansen's feverish
attempts at creating new life forms, trying to find the perfect organism which
will adapt and survive any change in its environment, and how he couldn't
imagine a more versatile example than the worm which, even though it lies on
the ground crawling and rolling at a tediously slow pace, is invincible. It is
remarkable exactly because of its primitivism. According to Jansen's findings,
of all the life forms he's researched the worm has the highest chances of
survival.
Therefore, I needed an
extremely simple organism with movements that require a minimum amount of
energy and I found it in the old and famous Snake video game, which was
launched during the '70s and then reused by Nokia Mobile Phones in 1998.
(III) The map is an invented map, an atypical one, filtered by personal
experiences and printed on a piece of natural Chinese silk. It is the sum of
all my experiences related to this project, a product of researching and
understanding the area, its inhabitants with their traits and trades, its
climate and geography so that I will know what kind of perils the Tarim machine
will have to face along its way. It's a collection of personal signs and
symbols which help me map the area in a completely non-scientific manner. (Mădălina Lazăr)
