Bucharest Biennial artists revealed

ISTANBUL - Hürriyet Daily News

The fifth Bucharest Biennial, which will be held on May 25 to July 22 announces the 19 participating artists, includes Crotatian, French and American artists .

Curator Anne Barlow has announced the 19 participating artists for the fifth Bucharest Biennale, according to the Art Newspaper.

The biennial aims to promote awareness and the dissemination of culture, particularly in the fields of the arts, by means of exchanges and cultural cooperation within Europe and beyond, and is looking for strategies to develop mutual understanding and offer insights from different perspectives.

“Tactics for the Here and Now” is due to take place from 25 May to 22 July and includes the Croatian artist David Maljkovic, the French/American artist Alexandre Singh, and the American artist Jill Magid. At a press conference in February, Barlow, the executive director of Art in General, New York, said she had looked for artists “whose agency lies less in overt statements, but rather in investigative, indirect or informal approaches that possess their own kind of power,” reported the Art Newspaper.

In the last few years, the “here and now” has been increasingly referred to as “precarious,” giving rise to a number of publications, conferences and exhibitions that examine the relationship between different forms and interpretations of precariousness in relation to current artistic practice.

As Hal Foster noted in his article “Precarious”: “Over the past decade, this condition became all but pervasive, and it is this heightened insecurity that much art has attempted to manifest, even to exacerbate.

This social instability is redoubled by an artistic instability, as the work at issue here foregrounds its own schismatic condition, its own lack of shared meanings, methods or motivations.”

Biennial venues for the fith edition

According to the Art Newspaper, “The biennial will use venues not normally associated with visual art, including, for the first time, Bucharest’s striking Casa Presei Libere (House of the Free Press).

A Soviet-style relic, the building acted as the headquarters of the official news media during Romania’s communist era.

The Iranian-born artist Abbas Akhavan is creating a work in response to the building for the biennial.”
A strong component of the Biennale involves a reworking of certain histories from the civic to the personal, according to the biennial’s written statement. “In a way that is not always about nostalgia or narrative, but is rather a deliberately constructed perspective on the contemporary,” continued the written statement announced by the biennial committee.