Romanian Pavilion / 53rd La Biennale di Venezia

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Romanian Pavilion / 53rd La Biennale di Venezia

August 27, 2009

Romania presents three artists at the 53rd International Art Exhibition – La Biennale di Venezia 2009: Stefan Constantinescu, Andrea Faciu and Ciprian Muresan. Their works are shown within the framework of a site-specific installation conceived by the studioBASAR architectural group as a theatre set. The exhibition is entitled “The Seductiveness of the Interval“. Excerpt from the press release after the jump.

53rd International Art Exhibition – La Biennale di Venezia 2009. Press Preview, June 4, 2009.

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From the ress release: “Artists possessing the experience of exile, of the shift in political regimes, social transitions, Stefan Constantinescu, Andrea Faciu and Ciprian Muresan relate in their work to the theatricalisation of social practices, the encrypted “dramaturgy” of the public realm, and the complex order of individual destiny.

Stefan Constantinescu was born in 1968 in Bucharest and now lives in Stockholm, Sweden, and Bucharest, Romania. His works “Troleibuzul 92″ and “Passagen” are focused on events, situations and everyday occurrences – which confront personal destiny with historical dystopias, expressed either in the form of anthropological documentary or fictional film with neo- realist features. Putting onto the stage what is personal, intimate, subjective, Stefan Constantinescu confers upon his films the status of investigations into themes such as solitude, alienation and social violence.

Andrea Faciu was born in 1977 in Bucharest and lives in Munich, Germany. In “EXUBERANTIA suspended,” the artist is the director of a screenplay in which the viewer escapes into a detemporalised space of reverie. Reflecting on the reciprocity between stage and spectator, between the instrumental and the aesthetic, between the object of dreaming and the dreamer, Andrea Faciu proposes the traversal of an experience in which the instantaneity of the relationship between subject and world is dominant.

Ciprian Muresan was born in 1977 in Dej and lives in Cluj-Napoca, Romania. His works “Auto-da-Fe” and “Dog Luv” operate with different modalities of transposing literary texts into images. The artist does not pursue fidelity to the text or narrative re-construction, but rather the staging of sophisticated visual sequences, in order to punctuate versions of the real, obsessively inter-related with the imaginary. The subtle tension released by the subjective re-transcription of texts offers the spectator a projection of fragments of a world in transformation, in which aspects of security, control and individual choice are brought to the fore.

Dwelling upon the still open severance between the artist’s vision and the viewer’s expectations, between what the artist places on stage as a “scenario” and what the viewer progressively discovers in time, The Seductiveness of the Interval proposes a reflection upon the conditions whereby the exhibition space is transformed into a space of self-reflection by means of the gaze.”