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

| Tue 9 May

Mona Vătămanu & Florin Tudor – ​​Omnia Communia Deserta (2020, 29 min)

OMNIA refers to “Omnia sunt communia” which means “All things are held in common”, a
call for new ways of constituting society. This quote was attributed to Thomas Müntze, a
German preacher and reformer who led the German peasant rebellions in the sixteenth
century. Omnia Communia Deserta continues the artists’ collaboration with the philosopher
and cultural theorist Ovidiu Tichindeleanu to retrace material imprints of history and past
utopias within architecture. As with the work Gargarin’s Tree from 2016 filmed mainly at
the Gagarin Youth Centre in Chișinău, Sala Omnia becomes a backdrop for a reflection on
the larger effects of modernity, the exploitation of resources and the disillusionment with the
promises of the commons. Conceived as a guided tour by Tichindeleanu inside Sala Omnia,
the film captures the iconic building at a turning point in time, walking the viewer from the
ground floor to the majestic auditorium room found in ruins. Tichindeleanu points out the
symbols and choreography of power that are embedded in the architecture of the building:
from the design of the ceiling, windows, staircase and auditorium to the different decor
elements defined by archaic and folk traditions. He situates the Sala Omnia within the
broader history of modernity as a palimpsest of utopian dreams whose legacy is palpable in
the present and long lasting.

Bo Wang – The Revolution Will Not Be Air-conditioned (2022, 27 min)

SHOPPING MALL, in the socialist vision of its founder, the architect Victor Gruen, carried
the possibility to bring community to the postwar suburbia. Gruen envisaged the shopping
mall as a microcosm of retail, art, residences, offices and medical centre, schools, and so on.
This urban vision that he witnessed shattered by the dominance of commerce was inspired by
the town centre of Vienna, his beloved native city that Gruen fled to escape the Nazis making
his way to the United States. In The Revolution Will Not Be Air-conditioned, Bo Wang
generates connections across spaces of modernity such as the botanical garden, the world fair
or the shopping mall that draw inwards a globalised version of people and plants alike. The
film is constructed by footage from archives, youtube channels, video games, zombie and
thriller films that all together build the imaginary of the shopping mall. The shopping mall is
represented as a quintessential space of consumerism, surveillance and strict hygiene, which
the split-screen construction of the film only amplifies. Inserting recordings from the 2019
Hong Kong anti-extradition protests to which the film’s title, borrowed from social media
comments, alludes, the artist captures the transformation of the mall from a space of retail to
one of uprising. In parts of East Asia and Southeast Asia, the shopping mall exceeds its retail
purpose and fulfils the needs of minorities and communities that echo decades after Gruen’s
original vision and subverts the narrow purpose of today’s mall centre.

Biographies

Mona Vătămanu and Florin Tudor (1968/1974) live and work in Bucharest. Personal exhibitions (selected): Omnia Communia Deserta, La Loge, Brussels (2020); Prăpădenia pământului, Salonul de proiecte, Bucharest (2016); All that is solid melts into air, Extra City Kunsthal, Antwerp (2013); Powerlessness a Situation. Revolutie, Frankfurter Kunstverein, Frankfurt (2013); The order of things, daadgalerie, Berlin (2012); All Power to the Imagination!, Secession, Vienna (2009); Surplus Value, BAK, basis voor actuele kunst, Utrecht, 2009. Their works were included in group exhibitions such as Kathmandu Triennale 2077, Patan Museum, Kathmandu (2022); Baltic Triennial 14: The Endless Frontier, CAC Contemporary Art Centre, Vilnius (2021); A Biography of Daphne, ACCA Australian Centre for Contemporary Art, Melbourne (2021); Borderlines, Talbot Rice Gallery, Edinburgh (2019); The Street. Where the World Is Made, Maxxi Museo Nazionale delle arti del XXI secolo, Roma (2019); Art Encounters Biennial, Timisoara (2019), Gaudiopolis – Attempts at a Joyful Society, GfZK Galerie fur Zeitgenossische Kunst Leipzig (2018); Bring it to Life, Place. Labour. Capital, NTU Centre for Contemporary Art, Singapore (2015); Social Factory, 10th Shanghai Biennale, Power Station of Art, Shanghai (2014); A History, Centre Pompidou, Paris (2014); Something in Space Escapes Our Attempts at Surveying, Württembergischer Kunstverein Stuttgart (2014); Report on the Construction of a Spaceship Module, New Museum, New York (2014); Untitled, 12th Istanbul Biennial (2011); Call the Witness, Roma Pavilion Collateral Event, 54th Venice Biennale, Venice (2011); Over the Counter, Mucsarnok Kunsthalle, Budapest (2010); Shockworkers of the Mobile Image, 1st Ural Industrial Biennial, Yekaterinburg (2010); Art as Gift, Periferic Biennial 8, Iasi (2008); 5th Berlin Biennial, When Things Cast No Shadow, KW Institute for Contemporary Art, Berlin (2008); 52nd Venice Biennale, Romanian Pavilion, Low-Budget Monuments, Venice (2007). In 2011, they received a scholarship from DAAD Berlin within the Berliner Kunstlerprogram.

Bo WANG is an artist, filmmaker and researcher based in Amsterdam. His works have been exhibited internationally, including venues like Guggenheim Museum and Museum of Modern Art (New York), Garage Museum (Moscow), International Film Festival Rotterdam, CPH:DOX (Copenhagen), Visions du Réel (Nyon), LUX & Open City Documentary Festival (London), DMZ Docs (South Korea), and Para Site (Hong Kong), among many others. His film An Asian Ghost Story (2023) was granted the New:Vision Award at CPH:DOX 2023. He received a fellowship from the Robert Flaherty Film Seminar in 2013, and was an artist-in-residency at ACC-Rijksakademie from 2017 to 2018 as well as at NTU CCA Singapore in 2016. He is currently a PhD candidate at Amsterdam School for Cultural Analysis, University of Amsterdam.

***

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.