By Noemi Smolik
Adrian Ghenie, The Darwin Room, 2013/2014, installation, internal measurements: 350 cm x 435 cm x 735 cm, courtesy the artist and Pace Gallery, London
Timisoara in western Romania, on the border with Hungary and Serbia, is the city of Nobel literature laureate Herta Müller, it occurred to me when I received an invitation to the city’s ‘Art Encounters’ biennale. Years ago, I devoured her books like an addict, even though they were hard to stomach. Few have described the drama of the abuse of power in such a pathos-free, down-to-earth way.
I was somewhat wary, then, about visiting places where the dramas described by the Romanian-born German novelist unfolded during the era of the repressive post-war communist regime. But then I suddenly found myself standing in a square, behind me the magnificent Romanian Orthodox cathedral, in front of me art nouveau residences whose grandeur surprised me.
There was no trace of the stuffy shabbiness that I knew from Müller’s books. Having been expanded as a garrison town on the borders of the Ottoman Empire by its Austro-Hungarian rulers from the early 18th century, Timisoara was a melting pot inhabited by Hungarians, Serbs, Jews, Romanians, and Germans, the largest ethnic group before World War II. Catholic, Serbian or Romanian orthodox and protestant churches, as well as a large synagogue, all located close to one another, still testify to their coexistence.
The Synagoge of Timisoara, Romania
This history is something the businessman and collector Ovidiu Sandor, initiator of this first Timisoara Biennale, would like to draw on. Sandor made his money as a property developer, including a huge office complex in the city centre that hosted the biennial show where I discovered the Sigma group (had I discovered nothing else, the trip would still have been worthwhile). Founded in 1969 and existing until 1980, Sigma included not only artists (among them Constantin Flondor, Doru Tulcan and Stefen Bertalan) but also architects, musicians and academics who all taught at Timisoara’s art academy. Opposing the rationality of geometric abstraction, the group turned to the laws of nature with its seemingly chaotic proliferation as a source of new concepts for architecture, art and design. Their actions in nature can be seen as an alternative to western Land Art, and their architectural experiments prefigured ecological building, exerting an influence on Romanian architecture in particular.
Sigma, ‘Cartography of Learning 1969–1983’, exhibition view
A factory space right behind the office complex hosted another exhibition belonging to the biennale, which is spread over more then fifteen locations across the city, as well as one in the nearby town of Arad. The curators of this show, and of the biennale as a whole, were Nathalie Hoyos and Rainald Schumacher from Berlin. They focussed above all on the Romanian art scene – which has plenty to offer, as demonstrated in the factory space. Framed by the work of internationally known artists like Saádane Afif and Sofia Hultén, there was K (from Kafka), a series of drawings made in 1975 by Geta Bratescu, who is now also gaining recognition outside Romania, and the drawings of Ion Grigorescu. They were juxtaposed with work by Romanian artists who moved abroad, including the sculptor Paul Neagu whose pupils at London’s Royal College of Art included Anish Kapoor, Rachel Whiteread and Tony Cragg. The younger generation was represented by Mircea Cantor, Alex Mirutziu and Iona Nemes. The Cluj School was also present with the internationally renowned painter Adrian Ghenie whose The Darwin Room (2013–14) reconstructs a morbid study – possibly that of a freemason – from a painting attributed to Rembrandt, Philosopher in Meditation (1632). Another striking work here was the video No Hope for a Future (2015) by Bogdan Armanu and Silvia Amancei whose absurdly humorous sequences explore the relationship between propaganda/advertising and the seductions of erotic love. The caricatures of Dan Perjovschi, perhaps the best known Romanian artist today, covered the factory’s glass facade.
Dan Perjovschi, banner by Lia Perjovschi, courtesy the artists
I met Ovidiu Sandor for lunch at a smart Italian restaurant. He told me about the courses organized by the biennale for teachers to encourage them to bring their pupils to the event. This had been a success; the exhibitions really were full. And then he began talking about a sense of the absurd, not only in Romania but also among other artists from Central Europe, including Franz Kafka. In his view, since people in these countries, unlike those in Western Europe, historically had a much harder time to fully realize themselves, they tend to view history and life itself as something absurd. As someone who grew up in Prague, the capital of a country that was ground down between the successive demands of the Austro-Hungarian monarchy, the German Reich and the Soviet Union, I can only agree.
Ana Lupas, Humid Installation, 1970–2015
I continued on my way, past Herta Müller’s secondary school, to the art museum. As the motto for the biennale, the curators chose these words from Constantin Brancusi: ‘What is real is not the external form, but the essence of things. Starting from this truth, it is impossible for anyone to express anything essentially real by imitating its exterior surface.’ The artist Ana Lupas seems to have taken this motto to heart: a tiny window built into the external wall of the museum showcased the ‘essence’ of Humid Installation, a performance she has been staging since the 1960s: a bowl, a piece of cloth and a screen showing documentary footage including the first performance of the piece in 1970 in a village in Transylvania, where the artist and a hundred villagers hung wet white bedsheets on dozens of washing lines until they had shrouded an entire hill. Lupas is an artist worth discovering.
Constantin Brancusi. Sketch for the Endless Column, 1937
Ink on B&W Photography, 9 cm x 6 cm, private collection, Romania
Inside the museum, there was a homage by Romanian artists to Brancusi’s Endless Column (1938). Columns in all manner of materials and styles, and among them a treasure: two yellowed black-and-white photographs of landscapes, never exhibited before, onto which Brancusi had drawn the columns. I also visited the private gallery Jecza, located in an inconspicuous house on a square that had been filled with sculptures on the initiative of the gallery. And finally, the Museum of the Revolution that documents not the Communist Party’s seizure of power but its demise, which began in Timisoara – something the city’s inhabitants are especially proud of. On 15 December 1989, the population took to the streets. There was shooting and over a hundred were killed. The demonstrations then gripped the whole country and Nicolae Ceausescu, the leader of the Communist Party, was toppled. This story is told in rooms resembling something designed by the Russian artist Ilya Kabakov. And here I was overcome by the oppressive hopelessness of the leaden years before the revolution, and which I know from the books of Herta Müller. Thank God, I thought to myself, that this nightmare is over.
Translated by Nicholas Grindell