extramuros program
The Other Side of This Side
SEP.20 – OCT.18.2024
WITH WORKS BY Irina Botea Bucan, Lucian Bran, Tudor Bratu, Femke Hoppenbrouwer, Andrei Mateescu, Sonata Riepšaitė, Mihai Șovăială, Anna Witt
CURATED BY The Balcony in conversation with Laura Bivolaru
LEILEI GALLERY, BUCHAREST
OPENING
SEP.19.24 - 19:00
“In this exhibition, the representation of space becomes a pretext for artists to deconstruct the present, from its skeletal past made up of speculation and historical facts alike to potential futures that accumulate meaning around particular places, objects, and ideas.
Concerned with a wide range of contemporary issues, from the management of cultural heritage to neo-liberal labour, the artists meditate on the concept of space in its different forms - buildings, landscape, the city, as well as in various stages - from distant memory to being under construction. The locations the artists either gaze at intensely or photograph furtively are represented as intersections between the human body and the larger historical context, opening up the possibility of signification even in the case of apparently insignificant subjects - a worker’s glove in the dirt, a veiled socialist modernist block, a fallen fence, a lamp post.
With every project, the viewer is invited to partake in the construction of the image of the world as it looks in the photographic now and to ask themselves in what ways their subjectivity will interfere with this process, impacting how the image proliferates both backward and forward in time.”
- extract from the curatorial text by Laura Bivolaru
The exhibition is part of the "INTERVAL Nodes – Portable Borders" project, which complements the program initiated in 2022 by the Slow-Sync PH association at the CAV Multimedia space. The program focuses on developing network nodes between similar artist-run spaces in The Hague, Bucharest, Cluj, Timișoara, and Iași, likewise exploring how these spaces manage to survive in the contemporary art scene.
Partners: Revista ARTA, Photography INFLUX
The cultural project is co-financed by the Romanian National Cultural Fund Administration (AFCN).
The exhibition is part of The Balcony’s extramuros program, in which collaborations take place across Europe’s vast network of artist-run & presentation spaces. Occurring each year in September to inaugurate the new cultural season under the sign of collaboration and exchange, The Balcony has this year teamed up with a group of artists and curators originally from Bucharest.
The Balcony
Nieuwe Molstraat 14-A2
The Hague, NL
Leilei Gallery
Str. Aurel Vlaicu 88-90
Sector 1 Bucharest, RO