READING TOGETHER [II]
MAXIM POLYAKOV și DANA ANDREI & SORIN POPESCU
Duo Exhibition
6th of September – 7th of October 2021
Monday, 6th of September 2021, 7p.m.
At tranzit. ro/ Iași space on Elena Doamna street, No. 37, Iași
”Bubble gum is very tasty in the beginning, but the taste end quickly. Than, all you have to do is just to inflate and pop bubbles endlessly. In this you have no limits. And you will also have candy wrappers - just like glass beads.” (extract from KOLXOZ image: Turbo Bubblegum)
The exhibition series Reading together inaugurated in July 2021 continues by adding, in the same exhibitional space, the contributions of Maxim Polyakov and Dana Andrei & Sorin Popescu.
Maxim Polyakov is an artist from Transnistria, a member of the KOLXOZ collective, where he deals with texts and ideology. He is a partisan of the front of the cultural proletariat and does not separate himself from all the processes of creativity and the daily life of the collective. Maxim's contribution to this exhibition was initiated and made by mail and includes a series of materials printed by the collective. All these will be displayed in the gallery space in order to enhance a communication situation.
“A поговорить literally means: Do you want to talk? "A pogovorit" is a communication situation. Often the subject does not matter, because the process has the nature of a speech ritual. It does not pursue another goal, apart from the process itself. It is included in the category of basic human needs. Coffee can be an accelerator of the moments „A pogovorit”". (Maxim Polyakov, 2021)
Dana Andrei and Sorin Popescu have been working together since 2013, and since 2015 they have also been the editors of CORNER magazine. For the exhibition Reading Together II, our guests propose a series of interventions and insinuations located in the gallery space, but with reverberations in the public space.
“After all, the act of reading, often intimate or solitary, becomes complete once it is shared with other people, propagated through various channels or networks and socialized. But how do we locate ourselves in a constant stream of content, repetitive images and accounts, where movement and the present are decomposed in standardized units of experience? How do we discern between information packets which weigh the same and are coming towards us on the same production line? What do we follow, really, and what do we want to extract from it? Through interventions in the exhibition space and public space interference, or insinuations at the border between the two, we look for strategies to rethink models of relating with the others and with the world/ourselves. We have nothing to declare.” (Dana Andrei & Sorin Popescu, 2021)
The current exhibition is part of a series of three duo shows organized in the frame of the projectExpoziția ca lectură (Exhibition as Reading) featuring works by artists and colleagues Beatrice Anghelache (RO), Baran Caginli (FI), Anca Benera & Arnold Estefan (RO/AT), Cătălin Gheorghe (RO), Dana Andrei & Sorin Popescu (RO) și Maxim Polyakov (MD).
It is superfluous to consider that exhibition making simply consists in bringing together “separated” artworks. This assemblage creates new contexts, raises awareness, promotes, presents and actualizes, frames and historicizes, evokes, develops, attempts to re-address questions, integrates and contextualizes, explores, challenges and collects to name but a few of many ways an exhibition can work. However, more or less importantly they construct the subjectivity of a curator, a position that is often contested, many times for good reasons. Who, why and what is this authority that acts as a gatekeeper of cultural affairs?
Therefore, one way to approach this was to try working with conceptual and esthetical counter expectations and move forward towards one of the questions of the reading groups organized in the frame of the same project: Who is the subject that reads and how do we read together?
Maxim Polyakov was born and lives in Tiraspol - now the capital of Transnistria, an unrecognized republic de jure part of Moldova, but de facto not controlled by it. He is a researcher and artist who explores material and symbolic spaces and ways to live in them. Maxim's works are inseparable from his everyday life practices, and often form a symbiosis with them, complementing each other. Usually he finds materials, technologies, inspiration and form of expression in places where he is. For this he uses anthropological, artistic and philosophical tools of observing or just interacting with people. Maxim gives preference not to individuals, but to collective practices, because he considers the collective as a work of art.
The working group of KOLXOZ cultural collective is represented by Viktor Veivoda (CZ), Maxim Polyakov (MD) and Anton Polyakov (PMR).
Dana Andrei and Sorin Popescu have been working together since 2013. Between 2015 and 2019 they were the editors of CORNER magazine, an artistic publication about the political aspects of football and the extended implications of the sports scene. Their research took the form of the exhibition The Realism of the Game, which opened at the Floreasca Hall in June 2021. Recently they were part of the projects Artistic Research on Plants (tranzit. ro/ Bucharest), Culture Class, developed by 1 + 1, Independent Artistic Initiatives, organized by Satellit Iași and the Intergalactic Summit of Independent Spaces, at Sandwich II. The economy of surveillance, pop culture, ecological thinking or public discourse are some of the recurring themes found in their practice.
This project is realised by Asociația 1+1 and tranzit. ro/ Iași, in partnership with Pleiade, Belgrade. The project EXHIBITION AS READING is co-funded by the Administration of the National Cultural Fund. This project does not necessarily represent the position of The Administration of the National Cultural Fund. AFCN is not responsible for the content of the project or how project results can be used. These are entirely the responsibility of the beneficiary of the funding.
The main partner of tranzit.ro is ERSTE Foundation.
