Monthly Archive: July 2012

The following series of interviews was conducted by Olga Stefan on the occasion of the exhibition Just Another Brick in the Wall, at Barbara Seiler Gallery, Zurich, December 8, 2011-January 7, 2012 (http://olgaistefan.wordpress.com/2011/12/01/life-coaching/). In conjunction with this exhibition, interviews were conducted with some of the participating artists, including the Bureau for Melodramatic Research (Bucharest), the Center for Visual Introspection (Bucharest), Lia Perjovschi (Sibiu/Bucharest), Club Electro Putere (Craiova), Paradis Garaj (Bucharest), H.arta (Timisoara), as well as with Dan Perjovschi (Sibiu/Bucharest) and Matei Bejenaru (Iasi). Stefan seeks to discover what concrete elements within the existing system are being criticized, and … Read more

Raluca Voinea is an art critic and curator based in Bucharest. Voinea studied Art History and Theory in Bucharest (1997-2001) and Curating Contemporary Art in London (2004-2006). In 2006 she co-founded E-cart.ro, a nonprofit, independent institution based in Romania dedicated to researching, producing and publicizing modern and contemporary art and architecture. Since 2009, E-cart.ro has been developing a new program of cultural debates and artistic interventions, under the generic title The Department for Art in Public Space. Voinea has been a co-editor of IDEA. Art + Society magazine, published in Cluj, Romania, since 2008. She is one of the directors … Read more

Paradis Garaj is a collaborative project by Stefan Tiron and Claudiu Cobilanschi that took place in a garage in the center of Bucharest. Various events and happenings occurred that subverted the traditional way of viewing art and opened itself to anyone with the slightest curiosity in its program.

Olga Stefan: You created a very interesting, new model for experiencing contemporary art: in a garage. The projects that you have held there, and your practice overall, are critical of existing power structures in the art community. What particularly do you oppose in the existing art system? What aspects do you feel … Read more

H.arta is a collective founded in 2001 in Timisoara composed of Maria Crista, Anca Gyemant, and Rodica Tache.

Olga Stefan: You are a collective of three female artists. How do collaborations evolve among you, and how do you manage to set aside egos in favor of the common goal?

H.arta: Our collaboration is based on our friendship. Friendship, as an inherent part of our lives: fulfils needs of intimacy, trust, and communication; provides an everyday support in the practical contingencies of life; constitutes a continual practice of negotiation in what concerns our ideas, difficulties, disagreements, and inherent hierarchies; ties private … Read more

Lia Perjovschi is an artist living and working in Sibiu and Bucharest. Her multidisciplinary practice recovers, collects, and disseminates information that has been inaccessible to Romania until 1989. A highly developed personal archive, Contemporary Art Archive, is formed through objects, diagrams, texts, images and film. She exhibits elements from this archive in different forms as her artistic project.

Dan Perjovschi is an artist, writer, and graphic artist living in Sibiu and Bucharest. Over the past two decades, Perjovschi has created drawings in museums, art centers, and public spaces. The drawings present political commentary in response to current events.

Olga … Read more