Imagined Organisations: Practices of Artistic Research Moving Across Semiperipheries
Ongoing project:
April 2026 – 15 November 2026
Iași (Romania) and Chișinău (Republic of Moldova)
July 22–27, 2026
This six-day international gathering, July 22–27, 2026 in Iași and Chișinău brings artists, curators and theorists together to exchange practices and perspectives on how artistic organisations face the new challenges raised by the transformative impact of artistic research. The practice and discourse of contemporary art have undergone profound changes with the emergence of artistic research, one of the most important factors that has shaped established practice in the field. Furthermore, artistic research has presented an entire set of new challenges and pressures on the institutional forms through which both state and non-state actors support artistic development. This has not been a uniform development, but one that has different characteristics across various political geographies.
Participation is free, but in-person places are limited, so booking is required by 10 July. We provide bus transport from Chișinău to Iași for the first 25 registered participants; all other costs are covered by the participants. The full programme and additional details are available here.
Contributors:
Clara Abdullah & Elena Russu (RO/MD/PMR), Bojana Piskur (SI), Dan Acostioaei (RO), Victor Ciobanu (MD), Charles Esche (NL), Djordje Balmajović (SI), Andrei Morari (PMR/MD), Minna Henriksson & Sezgin Boynik (FI/RKS), Vitalie Sprînceană (MD), Cătălin Gheorghe (RO), Cristina David (RO), Mick Wilson (IRL/SE), Olja Triaška Stefanović (SK), Ioana Florea (RO), Maria Hlavajova (NL), Ghenadie Popescu (MD), Baran Caginli (TR/FI), Livia Pancu & Florin Bobu (RO), Matei Bejenaru (RO), Vladimir Us (MD), Alexandru Țîrdea (RO), Maxim Polyakov (PMR/MD), Rusanda Alexandru (MD) and others.
A short glimpse into the 6 days ahead - among many other things happening.
While in the "former East", these changes overlapped with the major geopolitical shifts of the 1990s, in the "former West", the rise of artistic research was strongly driven by the internal discourses and practices of universities and arts academies. It is now clear that, in both geopolitical contexts, the new demands on institutional structures arising from the need for change generated by the specific challenges of artistic research have not been fully resolved.
Thus, between Iași and Chișinău, among many others, we will be looking together with Bojana Piskur at experimental museology's unfinished legacies — from alternative institutional models developed across the Global South and socialist Yugoslavia in the 1960s and '70s, such as the Museum of Solidarity in Santiago, the International Art Exhibition for Palestine, and the solidarity collection of the Museum of Contemporary Art in Skopje, to the political and curatorial constraints museums face today, and what these unresolved experiments might still offer contemporary institutional imagination. Clara Abdullah & Elena Russu, brings us in the process of organisation developed over the past half year and now being put into practice — the relocation of the independent cultural community from Casa Zemstvei in Chișinău, vacated for state-led restoration, toward a new space at Moldovafilm, and the distance between imagining and the real, lived process of organising the relocation of this community. Ioana Florea, opens up the contradictions in the political economy of organisations imagined within semiperipheries. Matei Bejenaru will share with us reflections on the Periferic biennial — born before Romania was part of NATO and the EU, running until its final edition in 2008, curated by Hegyi Dóra from tranzit.hu — on how it shaped the Iași scene and formed an entire generation of contemporary art in the city, and on the new configurations that have emerged in its absence. Alexandru Tîrdea will take us back to the Romanian 90s by looking at the main events as they appeared in the written press at the time and how this research has been presented to the public in the form of artistic research, back in 2019 at tranzit iași space. Minna Henriksson, Sezgin Boynik and Maxim Polyakov will present their research (in collaboration with Andrei Morari and Vitalie Sprînceană) into the small-scale, local organisational networks of antifascist resistance in interwar Bessarabia, and into the clandestine print networks — among them the early socialist newspaper Iskra, secretly printed in Chișinău in 1901–1902 — through which such resistance circulated internationally. All this will be shared via public lectures.
Other formats will include the launch of Moldo-futurism publication, by Vitalie Sprînceană as well as a minibus trip from Chișinău to Iași, when we will stop in Macarești village, on the Prut river, which marks the border between the Republic of Moldova and Romania. Here we will be hosted, in his native village, by Chișinău-based artist Victor Ciobanu in an event especially conceived for our gathering. Baran Caginli’s exhibition opening: Lost and Found opening will take place during the program, while Iasi based artist Dan Acostioaei will perform the Prayer for the strengthening of the unseen borders, thus ending the entire program in Iași and Chișinău.
Across the five days spent together there will be moments dedicated to reflection within the Red Thread sessions with Mick Wilson and Cătălin Gheorghe, or situations where any different other contributions from the group itself are welcomed within Open Mic sessions.
Chișinău and Iași
Chișinău and Iași, physically less than 150 kilometers distant from each other, offer between them a vantage point that troubles any simple reduction of perspective to geography. Chișinău, the capital of the Republic of Moldova, has made its historical journeys through the geopolitical upheavals, reversals and successive waves of expansion and withdrawal by Ottoman and Russian empires. Iași, located at the north-eastern edge of Romania; formerly at the centre of the principality of Moldavia and formerly part of the northern limit of the Ottoman empire, is now a border city of the European Union, in close proximity to the Russian war on Ukraine? These neighbouring cities stage an opportunity to think multiply the question of perspective.
Each city has generated its own particular cultural field and its own cultural energies and dynamics at similar scale and at what may be seen as the intersection areas of larger political conglomerates. Artistic scenes such as Iași and or Chișinău may allow mobile vantage points because of the intersections and tensions of these larger political conglomerates but also because of their specificity and their relative independence.
This event is part of the Imagined Organisations: Practices of Artistic Research Moving Across Semiperipheries, co-organised by 1+1 Association and tranzit.ro/ iași in partnership with HDK-Valand Academy of Art and Design, associated initiative of the Centre for Art and the Political Imaginary (CAPIm).
Partners: Oberliht Association, Visual Art Doctoral School of UNAGE, Play Gallery
@tranzitiasi is part of tranzit.org network.
The main partner of tranzit.org is the ERSTE Foundation.
This is a cultural project co-financed by the Administration of the National Cultural Fund (AFCN). The 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 for the way the project results can be used. These are entirely the responsibility of the beneficiary of the funding.
ro.tranzit.org
unuplusunu.org
@tranziiasi / Facebook tranzit.ro / @hdk_valand/ @capim.se / @unuplusunu
Image: škart/Djordje Balmajović, Visual Identity, 2026
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Imagined Organisations: Practices of Artistic Research Moving Across Semiperipheries