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

| Sat 13 May

Natasha Tontey – Garden Amidst the Flame (2022, 27 min)

GHOSTS as in Minahasan behemoths, including the rooster, ayam jago, and the coelacanth, raja laut mediate the encounter of the young protagonist Virsay with the world of Minahasa. This indigenous nation living in the North Sulawesi’s province of Indonesia embodies cultural beliefs in an all-encompassing equilibrium between the human and non-human. Drawing on her experience of karai, a ceremony that grants Minahasan warriors an armour of invincibility, in Garden Amidst the Flame, Natasha Tontey seeks to establish a queering approach towards gender, youth and ecology. The film’s protagonists are members of the Wulan Lengkoan, a dance troupe of school girls in Sonder, North Sulawesi, who practise kabasaran, an ancient martial art and war dance traditionally performed only by Minahasan men. Garden Amidst the Flame attempts to resituate expected roles of gender and masculinity in Minahsan society as well the continuities of traditions within the rapidly changing social and economic context of Indonesia. The playful interactions between the members of the child gang, and their engagement with ancestral culture, take place in many contexts, including during a traditional tinutuan meal, and on a journey to an ancestral burial ground with waruga sarcophagi. Shots in the protagonist’s bedroom reveal posters of Western celebrities and Indonesian Minahasan cultural figures revealing an increasingly globalised Minahasa world.

Anca Benera & Arnold Estefan – Blue Ground (2020-2021, 12 min)

EXTRACTION of diamond describes a history of greed, destruction and exhausted geographies. These reflections are poetically expressed in Anca Benera and Arnold Estefan’s Blue Ground through the viewpoint of a “fugitive diamond”, a subject and a witness to histories of extraction that are yet to be written. In this work, artists interconnect a number of distinct geographies and industries that share a common mineral: the diamond. In Blue Ground, the diamond comes to represent a symbolic frontier of human and technological relations to the landscape. This includes offshore diamond mining in Romania, environmental “scars” from the diamond extraction in the Namib desert, and industrial diamond manufacture in the Shannon region. Diamonds are frequently found in igneous rocks that are released as kimberlite or “blue ground” closer to the Earth’s surface. In 1908, a railroad worker in German South West Africa (today Namibia) discovered the first diamond, ushering in the era of diamond mining. As land resources deplete, the ocean becomes the next mining frontier. Today, some of the most valuable gems are mined off the coast of Namibia. The first custom-built diamond recovery vessel in the world, named Benguela Gem, was commissioned by the De Beers
Group and built in a Romanian shipyard on the Black Sea coast. It began its mission to mine Namibian waters in 2022.

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.

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.