Spatiu intact presentation

SPAȚIU INTACT – presentation Spațiu Intact is an artist-run space dedicated to promoting and producing contemporary art exhibitions and connected cultural events. Spațiu Intact is the visual arts division of the Intact Cultural Foundation, an independent, non-profit organization based in Cluj-Napoca, Romania.

Spațiu Intact was established in the current form in 2012. Spațiu Intact is open to a wide range of artistic discourses and practices, from painting to media arts, from performance to installation.

We exhibit and promote equally artistic expressions assumed as mainstream and those (self) defined as alternative or experimental. All the projects presented in the Spațiu Intact share a common vision and commitment to conceptual coherence, artistic excellence, critical thinking and social relevance. A special accent is placed on the dissemination and promotion of international, established artists within the Romanian cultural context, but we are equally focused on supporting and exhibiting local artists with international relevance.

Spațiu Intact is part of The Paintbrush Factory, a collective space for contemporary arts in Cluj, Romania. The Paintbrush Factory is the first collective project of such dimensions in Romania and also one of the most relevant examples of converting an industrial building into a cultural space.

Delivering relevant and high-quality cultural content, both for the artistic community and the wide audience, The Paintbrush Factory became one of the most renowned and appreciated spaces of contemporary art in the region and in the EU. SPAȚIU INTACT Fabrica de Pensule / The Paintbrush Factory 59-61 Henri Barbusse, 2nd floor, Cluj-Napoca, Romania http://fundatiaintact.ro contact@fundatiaintact.ro Tel: +40 743 130 023

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Intact Cultural Foundation History: Intact Cultural Foundation was established in 2000. It promotes various cultural projects and artistic discourses, from painting to video art, from performing arts to educational programs. The common denominator of all our projects is represented by the artistic excellence, conceptual coherence, social and cultural relevance and collaborative potential.

Collaborations: In over a decade of activity, Intact Cultural Foundation has collaborated with various prestigious institutions such as: David Zwirner Gallery (New York and London); Zeno X Gallery (Antwerp); Tate Modern (London); Gwangju Biennale, South Corea; National Theatre Cluj; University of Art and Design, Cluj; Museum of Art Cluj; Pro Helvetia; French Institute; Swedish Institute; Czech Cultural Center; Lyon Dance Biennale; Kunststation, Kleinsassen, Germany; Vonderau Museum, Fulda Germany; Théâtre de l’Octogone Pully, Lausanne; Amori Foundation, Lausanne; Festival Les Nuits de Noël, Strassbourg; Balkan Tranzit Festival, Normandie France; Gannat Festival, France; Ljubljana Festival, Slovenia; Radio Swiss International Bern; RSI Switzerland, Kanton Bern; City Halls of Bern (Switzerland), Fulda (Germany) and Trento (Italy).

Residence space: Intact Cultural Foundation has established a space for artistic residencies in 2011 as part the foundation’s educational program. The residence space, situated within the Spațiu Intact has hosted over 15 artists since its creation.

Artist-run-space – Spațiu Intact: Intact Cultural Foundation has opened a gallery space in 2012. It is an artist-run-space (non-profit gallery) based on curatorial projects and financed through grants and private donations. Spațiu Intact has a consistent and high quality program that includes exhibitions, artist talks and other artistic events.

Team: Florin Ştefan (President / Executive Director) Georgiana Buț (PR and Projects Coordinator)

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Exhibitions and events presented at SPAȚIU INTACT: Fake It! (Limited Edition) 5 October 2012 – 20 November 2012 Curator: Horea Avram.

Artists: Ondřej Brody & Kristofer Paetau, Radu Comşa, István László, Pascal Lièvre, Marius Tãnãsescu, Michael Mandiberg, Cristian Opriş, Florin Ştefan, Bogdan Teodorescu.

The exhibition was conceived as a possible site of reflection upon the fate of the “fake” nowadays, as an opportunity to challenge and question the actual relevance of a concept with so many variables, meanings and interpretations. The way in which the works in the exhibition engage and relate to the model is equally subversive and constructive, critical and conciliatory.

[Horea Avram]

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Arca lui Noe / Noah’s Ark / L’arche de Noé 24 January – 27 February 2013 Curator: Ami Barak.

Artists: Douglas Gordon (UK), Peter Kogler (AT), Allora & Calzadilla (USA), Adel Abdessemed (FR), Nira Pereg (IL), Anna Jermolaewa (RU/AT), Ciprian Mureşan (RO), Michel Blazy (FR), William Wegman (US), Guy Ben-Ner (IL).

The exhibition aims to present a series of varied works that have as subjects all those living beings who are as much like us, and who, from the beginning, were the source of various attitudes that show the essential features of the humanity. Some of the artists treat this as a mere object, creating an affective distance that becomes an emotional support of the work. Others refer to the “becoming-animal” and see it as a threshold that opens onto another perception of the world. [Ami Barak]

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Iosif Király Photography: From Melancholy to Trauma, From Document to Monument 14 March – 20 April 2013 Curator: Horea Avram The exhibition was comprised of two projects (work-in-progress): Reconstructions and Open Sky. Reconstructions speak of the need to resist the erasure of history, through a process that emotionally conserve the artist’s most intense remembrances on people and places. Composed by images taken from the same location and approximately from the same vantage point at different moments (minutes, days, even months or years later), these “reconstructions” articulate a multilayered visual field whereby each snapshot acts as a byte of information and memory. [Maria Rus-Bojan].

Open Sky is a project that speaks first and foremost about the (photographic) image as an instrument of surveillance and control—surveillance in its most technologically refined and politically charged manifestations. Iosif Király addresses these issues by exploring two different visual formats that correspond to two different mediatic, referential and ideological perspectives: black and white photos found in the archives of the Romanian communist secret police and screenshots from the Google maps seen on the street view. [Horea Avram]

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Cătălin Burcea The expansibility of the field of struggle 17 May – 25 June 2013 Curator: Marius Tănăsescu The exhibition is a way to problematize the real, although imperfect, state of the human rights in relation with an “ideal” system of which we are all a part. If expansibility is a natural quality of these human rights, their politization is an intrinsic part of our ways to interpret them, to manipulate them in a collective manner through spectatorial participation and direct (artistic) action. The expansibility of the field of struggle aims to be a possible form of capturing in concrete forms the gaseous state of the human rights, through artistic means such as installation art, photography and video art. [Marius Tănăsescu]

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Beyond Representation: Challenges of Contemporary Painting Michaël Borremans & Frank Demaegd in dialogue with Maria Rus Bojan and Horea Avram Michaël Borremans is a painter and filmmaker who lives and works in Ghent, Belgium. Michaël Borremans‘ drawings, paintings, and films present an evocative combination of solemn-looking characters, unusual close-ups, and unsettling still lifes. His paintings display a concentrated dialogue with previous art historical epochs, yet their unconventional compositions and curious narratives defy expectations and lend them an indefinable yet universal character.

[David Zwirner Gallery] The event is the first in a series of public dialogues with established international artists, hosted

by Spațiu Intact.

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Perry Bard Man With a Movie Camera: The Global Remake 5 October – 7 November 2013 Curator: Horea Avram.

Man With a Movie Camera: The Global Remake (2007-ongoing) is a crowd-sourced film based on Dziga Vertov’s much celebrated film Man With a Movie Camera (1929)—a day-in-the-life portrait of a city from dawn until dusk, as seen by a traveling cameraman. ...The Global Remake presents on a split screen, on the left, Vertov’s original film and on the right, images interpreting the original script created by people around the world and uploaded to dziga.perrybard.net. [Perry Bard]

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Cornel Brudaşcu Portrait of a Generation 31 October – 24 November 2013 Curator: Florin Ştefan Portrait of a Generation is the first personal exhibition dedicated to the early works of painter Cornel Brudaşcu, one of the most influential artists in Romania and especially in Cluj, a mentor of many young artists. In terms of pictorial representation, the works (from the collections of the museums in Cluj and Zalău) use a visual vocabulary that is partially based on Pop Art, although the artist interprets the subject in a highly personal manner. While it seems that Cornel Brudaşcu did not fully comprehend the aesthetic principles of this artistic movement, the artist had a good intuition about the contemporary changes in visual paradigm therefore introducing in his works visual elements appropriated from the Western advertising imagery and the experimental photography. [Maria Rus-Bojan]

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Art management course 22-23 March 2014 Organizer: Artmark Institute of Arts Management

The two days courses addressed various issues related to modern and contemporary arts phenomena, art gallery management, curatorial practice, public programs, art writing, history of art etc. The course was open to people closely interested in art, but not necessarily professionals in the field.

Speakers included (at The Museum of Art and at Spațiu Intact): Ioan Sbârciu, Călin Stegerean, Tiberiu Alexa, Doina Păuleanu, Pavel Șușară, Manuela Plăpcianu, Diana Dochia, Horea Avram, Florin Ștefan.

The course was part of the educational program organized by Spațiu Intact in partnership with various institutions.

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Adel Abdessemed Bird / Oiseau 9 April – 15 May 2014 Curator: Ami Barak Adel Abdessemed is one of the most successful artists today, appreciated by critics and public alike, but who was also the subject of important controversies (due to his audacious, provocative works). His highly conceptual art uses in a careful and masterful manner a great variety of materials and techniques. The exhibition Bird was inspired by Constantin Brancusi’s famous series of birds, some of the most important reference points in the modern art history. The artist was present at the closing of the exhibition when he engaged a dialogue with the curator, the organizers and the public. The exhibition was organized in collaboration with The French Institute, Cluj.

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Ramona Poenaru and Gaël Chaillat A Cabin in the City / Une cabane en ville 20 May 2014 – 20 June 2014 A Cabin in the City is the project of two French artists-in-residence, Ramona Poenaru and Gaël Chaillat. The artists worked over four weeks in the gallery to build a cabin out of cardboard boxes.

The cabin was used at the end of the residence as the space for a three-day performance involving video-mapping and direct action by artists, poets, architects, sociologists, choreographers etc. The project was inspired by Walden or, Life in the Woods, a book written by the American Henry David Thoreau, a reflection upon simple living in natural surroundings.

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Luc Tuymans In dialogue with Călin Dan 25 June 2014 Luc Tuymans is considered one of the most important contemporary European painters, and have a considerable influence on a younger generation of artists. Tuymans’ interest in the lingering consequences of colonialism and the world wars has a strong impact on the subjects he depicts. By altering specific images through the use of photographic techniques such as framing, cropping and close-ups he problematizes the image in this visual culture.

[Zeno X Gallery] The event is the second in a series of public dialogues with established international artists, hosted by Spațiu Intact.

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Florin Ștefan Elegia September 6 - October 4, 2014 Meaningfully referencing the Greek word “elegia”, this project represents a personal statement towards general themes of fear, anxiety and loneliness. Originally referring to a musical work of melancholic nature, in this particular context, the elegy acquires a visual expression that aims to go beyond mere representation. “9 to 10”, the title of the only work to be shown in the project space, induces the idea of frozen time, of intense feelings that ought to be preserved.

The painting represents the artist’s father in a contemplative state, and in a moment of revelation of the sense of life. By capturing this intense feeling of melancholy, the artist finds himself in the same state of incertitude as his father, searching for meanings that transcend any given moments in space and time. However, the only certitude is that this moment was captured at 9 to 10 in the evening, during dinner. [Maria Rus-Bojan] A Project realized by Le Plafond and MB Art Agency at Le Plafond, Amsterdam.

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Cornel Brudașcu at Gwangju Biennale 2014: Burning Down the House, South Korea The selection of rather unknown paintings by Cornel Brudașcu presented at Gwangju Biennale was made by curator Jessica Morgan based on the exhibition Portrait of a Generation (SPAȚIU INTACT, 31 October – 24 November 2013). It allows us to understand the stylistic evolution of the painter Cornel Brudaşcu, one of the most influential artists in Romania and especially in Cluj, opening at the same time a world of pictorial expressions that are able to convey the philosophy and the truths of his generation. Along with his friends and colleagues Ana Lupaş and Mircea Spătaru, Cornel Brudaşcu is an emblematic figure of the 1970s neo-avant-garde, as well as one of very few Romanian artists whose early works can be assimilated to Pop Art. [Maria Rus-Bojan]

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Arts Management Workstream 4–5 Sept. 2014 The workshops were co-organized by graduate working groups from University of Leipzig’s Institut für Kulturwissenschaften (Working Group Future Perspectives of Arts Management) and Colorado State University’s LEAP Institute for the Arts (Working Group Arts Leadership Dynamics) as part of ESA-Arts 2014: Art and its context: cross-disciplinary dialogue international conference.

AM 1: Arts Management Research: framing the future AM 2: On the lack of field specific methods and theory in arts management AM 3: Transatlantic Dialogue: differences & similarities of arts management in different contexts

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subREAL: Serving Art 1 (1997-1999) Curator: Horea Avram 12 Sept. 2014 – 7 Nov. 2014 subREAL group was established in 1990 and is considered one of the most important Romanian artistic groups with a significant international profile. In their work with photography, video, installation, and performance, subREAL explores the traumas, myths and clichés of the Romanian (recent) history and their impact in society and the art field. Serving Art 1 (1997-1999) is a photo installation containing over 700 b/w inkjet prints (18 x 24 cm), mounted on the gallery’s white walls. The photographs are made after negatives selected from the archive of the Arta magazine, the official Romanian art publication which controlled the public image of the local art between 1953 and 1989. The negatives represent artworks (painting, sculpture) photographed for print reproduction. But the images comprise also the “aural” context of the artworks, with props, objects and people holding the art object or a background cloth, therefore permitting us a glimpse into their contemporary world and the mechanisms of fabricating the official artistic discourse. In this sense, Serving Art 1 series is an elaborate way to critically address equally aesthetic conventions, political paradigms, power relations and photograph’s capacity to be truthful to reality and, at the same time, to be an efficient means of manipulation and control.

[Horea Avram]

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Forthcoming exhibitions at Spațiu Intact Among the artists invited to exhibit at Spațiu Intact in the next months are: Francis Alys (BE/MX) Rezi van Lankveld (NL) Alexandru Antik (RO), etc.

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