Inventory of the Week

Artists: Tekla Aslanishvili, Anca Benera & Arnold Estefan, Alia Farid, Migrant Ecologies, Alexandra Pirici, Emilija Škarnulytė, Natasha Tontey, Mona Vătămanu & Florin Tudor, Bo Wang, Mădălina Zaharia
Curator: Anca Rujoiu
Management and production: Radu Lesevschi
Projection Screen: Atelier Ad Hoc (George Marinescu and Daria Oancea)
AV support: Justin O’Shaugnessy, Marius Costache
Graphic design: Daniel & Andrew
Translations and editing: Sorina Tomulețiu

Screenings schedule

| Fri 12 May

Mădălina Zaharia – Bye Bye Confidence* (2023, 18 min)
*commissioned for Inventory of the Week

CONFIDENCE we were never really friends and by the look of things, we most probably never will be, states one of the protagonists in Mădălina Zaharia’s new film. What grounds the confidence of those who handle grand visions of the world or dominate personal relationships?  
Structured as a succession of informal conversations between friends in domestic settings, the film is an inquiry into the notion of “confidence” unpacked in visual and linguistic terms. Rather than pursuing the goal of gaining or strengthening “confidence”, an area popular in self-help literature, the film unfolds against the grain. It opens up a space for un-mastering confidence, letting free expectations of how one behaves in the world or even makes a film. In this filmic expression of un-mastering, the protagonists become a loose score for the colours and colours dictate the sound. The colours that break up and shape the rhythm are each responding to a character in the film —six characters (including Arrow the dog) and six colours. These liaise between people and conversations and provide a bit of space for things to expand or speed up. To each colour corresponds a different sound creating all together a cacophony of voices for red, nature for green, silence for indigo, and so on. There is a bit of fog from time to time, which like confidence itself, it comes and goes, and comes again. 

Emilija Škarnulytė – Burial (2022, 60 min)

POWER PLANTS, in particular nuclear energy facilities were established as sites of
geopolitical and economic power. Ignalina Nuclear Power Plant (INPP) in the north-east of Lithuania was commissioned by the Soviet Union in 1983 as a symbol of technological supremacy. An integral part of Soviet Union energy network, the power plant was a colonial project aiming to provide energy into the Western part of the Soviets’ occupied territories. Following Lithuania’s independence and the surge of fossil fuels prices from Rusia, INPP became an essential source of energy supplying in 1993 a record amount of eighty percent of electricity for the state. As INPP had a reactor similar to the Chernobyl one, the power plant was forced to be decommissioned by the EU government as a condition of Lithuania’s accession to Europe in 2009. Devoid of characters and linear narrative, the Burial is a sensorial trip into this vast power plant. With long pans, slow movement and piercing sound, this audiovisual essay transforms the materiality of industrial leftovers such as heavy machinery, complex control panels into cultural objects. The title alludes not only to the current state of the power plant, at present put at rest but also to its future. This desolate industrial scenery, the artist suggests, will eventually become part of the planet’s geological structure.

Biographies

Madalina Zaharia (b. 1985, Sighetu Marmatiei, Romania) is a Romanian artist and filmmaker who lives and works in London. Her film, Public Figure – made in collaboration with poet and performer Ryan Ormonde, won the best film in the national competition prize at Bucharest International Dance Film Festival 2021 and was also part of the official selection for SQIFF 2021 (Scottish Queer International Film Festival) in Glasgow and GRRL HAUS CINEMA 2021 in Boston, MA. Recent exhibitions include: TrisxtOTL, Ivan Gallery (solo), Bucharest 2022; VIDEO+RADIO+LIVE (co-lateral event of the Art Encounters Biennial 2021), Casa Artelor, Timisoara; So Far So Good, Budapest Gallery, Budapest; Viral self-portraits, Moderna galerija (MG+MSUM), Ljubljana; Art Encounters Biennial 2019, Timisoara; Reading as Rhythm: A Sonic Exploration of the Visual Vocabulary of Control Magazine, Tate Exchange Liverpool (2018); DEBT., Tintype Gallery (solo), London (2017); Identify Your Limitations, Acknowledge The Periphery, Vitrine Gallery, London (2016); The Staging of an Exhibition, Ivan Gallery (solo), Bucharest (2016); London Open 2015, Whitechapel Gallery, London.

Natasha Tontey is an interdisciplinary artist based between Jakarta and Yogyakarta, Indonesia. Her artistic practice predominantly explores the fictional accounts of the history and myths surrounding “manufactured fear.” In her practice, she observes any possibilities of other futures that are projected not from the perspective of major and established institutions, but from a subtle and personal struggle of the outcasted entities and beings. Her recent exhibitions include a solo show at Auto Italia, London (2022) and selected group shows at Singapore Biennale (2022); De Stroom Den Haag (2022); GHOST 2565, Bangkok (2022); Protozone8 Queer Trust, Zürich (2022); Arko Art Council, Seoul (2022), Leeum Museum of Art, Seoul (2022); Hamburger Bahnhof, Museum für Gegenwart, Berlin (2021); transmediale, Berlin (2021); Performance Space 2021, Sydney; Other Futures, Amsterdam (2021); Singapore International Film Festival (2021), Kyoto Experiment 2021; Asian Film Archive, Singapore (2021). In 2020, she received the HASH Award from the ZKM, Center for Art and Media Karlsruhe and Akademie Schloss-Solitude. She is a fellow for Human Machine of the Junge Akademie at Akademie der Künste Berlin 2021-2023.

***

Anca Rujoiu (b.1984, Bucharest) is a curator and editor. She is part of the curatorial team for the 2024 edition of the Diriyah Contemporary Art Biennial. In 2019, she was the co-curator of the third edition of the Art Encounters Biennial in Timișoara. This edition proposed the methodology of encounters as an organising principle rather than an overarching theme. As curator of exhibitions and later head of publications (2013–18), she was a member of the founding team of the NTU Centre for Contemporary Art Singapore, contributing to the Centre’s first exhibitions, public programs and publishing projects. As part of the curatorial initiative, FormContent in London, she worked on a nomadic project, It’s Moving from I to It (2011-13) that took the format of a script comprised of seventeen “scenes”: exhibitions, workshops, commissioned texts, and the like.

Organised by
Solitude Project in partnership with The National Center for Dance Bucharest

Co-financed by
Administration of the National Cultural Fund
The project does not necessarily represent the position of The Administration of the National Cultural Fund. The Administration of the National Cultural Fund is not responsible for the content of the project or the manner in which the results of the project may be used. These are entirely the responsibility of the funding recipient.