tranzit.ro/ bucurești/ cluj/ iași/ sibiu/

5 March - 27 March

tranzit.ro/ Iași: Andreas Fogarasi – Installation
Curator: Cristian Nae
Opening: Cupola Gallery, 5th of March 2015, 7 p.m.
Screening: Republica Cinema, 6th of March 2015, 4 p.m.

tranzit.ro/ Iași invites you to the opening of Andreas Fogarasi’s new site-specific project at Cupola Gallery in Iași. The event will be accompanied the following day by the screening of Culture and Leisure (Kultur und Freizeit) video work and a public discussion moderated by Cristian Nae. For Kultur und Freizeit, originally exhibited at the Hungarian Pavilion at the 52nd Biennale di Venezia, 2007, Fogarasi was awarded the Golden Lion for best national participation.

”Andreas Fogarasi’s solo exhibition, with the title "Installation", addresses the interplay between façade and inner structure, appearance and historical discourse, content and context. Likewise it can be seen as an elaboration upon the double faceted existence of conflicting ideologies such as neoliberal capitalism and communist socialism, embedded into overlapping material histories.

The exhibition bears a simple title, which refers to the language of minimal and conceptual art. Reminiscences of this legacy can be found in the interventions in gallery space, accompanied by short textual descriptions and prescriptions. The network of ambiguous objects blurs the boundaries between use and aesthetic value. They simultaneously propose an exercise of imagination and materialize invisible, potential modes of urban existence. A new work of art in the shape of a main installation piece constructed specifically for this site, in conjunction with two other works – Cities, 2009/2010 and Panorama (The Right of View), previously exhibited in different contexts of reception – function together and may be perceived as a single modular installation. More precisely, his intervention in the Cupola Gallery not only situates the city’s recent history into the larger questioning of (socialist) modernism and its legacy, but it also articulates a politics of locality at a moment when Iasi is undergoing a radical process of visual rehabilitation.

Fogarasi’s main intervention uses the existing grid of 33 x 33 cm tiles on the floor as a predetermined compositional structure in which he is exchanging individual tiles for other materials – pieces appropriated from different ”sites” in Iaşi –, as well as simply experimenting within this grid, for instance by filling the squares with concrete, plaster, terrazzo or transparent resin. The mosaic tiles belong to the “vertical site” archive, an existing project which rescues and preserves remains of the former architectural facades in post-socialist cities. The grid-like structure appropriated by Fogarasi on the floor of the gallery recalls the modernist aspirations to a complete rationalization of living (manifested in urban planning and shared by socialist modernism). On display, these may create a visual topography of oblivion and an urban cartography of transience.
It is perhaps in this logic that the exhibition is accompanied by the screening of Fogarasi’s 2007 award winning short-film series Kultur und Freizeit (Culture and Leisure), which deals with the current, precarious situation of the former Worker’s Clubs in Central and Eastern Europe. In the setting of the outmoded Cinema Republica, Fogarasi’s films, which are questioning the present and past division between labour and leisure, between productive and unproductive time, acquire a new dimension of meaning and renewed relevance.” (Cristian Nae)