| 06 September 2011
Iasi, Romania
30 May – 14 June 2003
Concept
Prophetic Corners. Dealing With the Future
By Anders Kreuger (SE), curator of Periferic 6
That secret passion called future:
Which, in every great life, is counter-force
To other passions – counter-force and secret bedrock!
Vilhelm Ekelund (1880 – 1949): posthumous fragment
Dealing With the Future
Perhaps this cryptic Swedish poet was right. The future is inside us; it’s a driving force, and it feeds off the past. We use it as a tool for fashioning what matters most to us now: the present, our constant becoming. We have an almost instinctively pragmatic relation to our own personal future. We make plans, trying to predict things in our life and to evade the insight that some things will inevitably happen to us. Isn’t it strange, then, that the future is so often dealt with in cultural terms as something impersonal and imperial, something “futuristic” or “futurological”?
Western thinking has long been dominated by a linear understanding of time. In both grammar and philosophy, the future is traditionally seen as the weakest of the three basic tenses. The future tends to be associated not with “hard” knowledge (which we imagine to be verifiable in the present and past), but with the “soft” concept of utopia (a word that once meant “nowhere-land”). Since the future doesn’t yet exist, we have no facts about it, and we don’t know how to “deal” with it. In a culture that privileges information over intuition, the future remains a great unknown, a dream, a leftover.
What is thinking? This is the title of a lecture that Martin Heidegger delivered in 1952. It contains a seed of revolt against the linearity of time and the tyranny of the past in Western thought. Heidegger uses the rhetorical figure of recurrence to build another model for time. His hint at a possible new status of the future has become famous: “The thing most worthy of thought is that we do not yet think.” In reference to Nietzsche, he writes:
Our Will shall only be free of its repulsion against Time, against its being-only-past, if it perpetually embraces this going away and coming back. Our Will shall be free of the repulsiveness of the “Past” if it embraces the perpetual return of all “Past”. Our Will shall be rid of repulsion if it embraces the perpetual return of the Same. 1)
This evocative and problematic strain of thought never quite gained access to the mainstream. We are, in general, obsessed with the quest for “the New”. Quite often, the future becomes a projection of such ideal newness. We should remember, though, that for many people the future brings little new, only more of the same. And most of us rather appreciate this kind of repetitive continuity.
The idea of the future as something less dramatic than we usually imagine, as recurrence, as an insufficiently explored source of conceptual and artistic inspiration: that was one point of departure for exhibiting some 40 contemporary art projects in the city of Iasi (a.k.a. Jassy) in northeastern Romania. The exhibition asked for a commitment to the future that goes beyond the individual but stops short of the programmatic or utopian. It also proposed the future as an “antidote” to melancholy obsessions with the past and with the losses evoked by 20th century European history, not least in locations like our host city.
Prophetic Corners
Another point of departure for the exhibition was the idea that some places are better suited than others for articulating these aspects of the future: historically charged places that must learn to look forward, places that have ended up in borderline situations, places that think of themselves as peripheral.
The city of Iasi seems to fit all these descriptions. It’s a former capital city (of the now-defunct Principality of Moldova) with a developed educational and cultural infrastructure. It has some 350,000 inhabitants, no less than seven universities, a National Theatre, a Philharmonic Society and a number of museums and libraries. There are countless churches and monasteries of different confessions. After the Second World War, Iasi came to be located just a few kilometers from the Romanian-Soviet border, which today is the border with the Republic of Moldova. With its laid-back lifestyle, centered on sipping local wines in hillside gardens, Iasi is something of a well-kept secret to the rest of the world. Still, in just a few years the city will become an important outpost for “New Europe”, the extended European Union and NATO.
The exhibition title was borrowed from a dense little book from the late 1930s. This is what Walter Benjamin writes in A Berlin Childhood Around Nineteen Hundred about the Sea Otter in Berlin’s Zoological Garden:
With the white bulbs of its lamp posts, the alley that greeted the visitor there was reminiscent of a deserted promenade in Eilsen or Bad Pyrmont, and long before those locations became so deserted as to seem more antique than Roman baths, this corner of the Zoological Garden showed signs of something about to come. It was a prophetic corner. Just as some plants are said to have the power of letting us see into the future, there are locations that have the same gift. Mostly, they are deserted plots, but also tree tops facing walls, blind alleys or front gardens where no one ever stops. In such places, everything that really lies ahead of us seems like a past.
The location, the site, the topos is a key component in most statements that art makes, statements for which language alone is never enough. Many issues in art can, if necessary, be reduced to a question of “where in the world?” or “in which province of the mind?” This corresponds to Freud’s “topographic point of view” on the Unconscious. The corner is a topographic figure rich in potential meaning. It has an inside and an outside. It’s the intersection of two destinations (“the corner of this and that street”), a situation where vision is partially blocked (“looking around the corner”), a site tucked away in the outskirts of the accessible world (“the remotest corner”), a place from which there is no escape (“cornered”). And so on.
But what about the “prophetic”? Is Benjamin using this word, so over-burdened with religious significance, only to stimulate our imagination? It wouldn’t be quite like him. In antiquity, the two preferred ways of predicting things to come was to listen to the oracle (who knows nothing, or pretends not to know, letting the unknown speak through her) or the prophet (who knows something, or pretends he knows, speaking on behalf of the unknown). These methods are reflected in today’s futurology or ”futures studies”, conducted by sometimes obscenely well-funded think tanks in the Western capitals. In both cases, the borders between knowing and not knowing are deliberately blurred. Indeed, belief may always have a part to play when we’re dealing with the future. In addition, the exhibition title may be charged with local, ”site-specific”, meaning. Iasi is an important centre for the Romanian Orthodox church (the annual St. Paraschiva pilgrimage brings around one million visitors to the city) and messianistic convictions are not foreign to this predominantly rural, conservative part of the country.
“Prophetic Corners” are locations that let us see into the future. They are sites that become non-sites, where the future collapses into the past, where we can experience a state of faceless, weightless becoming. The curator and the participating artists suggest that Iasi is such a location.
The Exhibition
It is, of course, important to keep in mind that Prophetic Corners was conceived and realised as an art exhibition. It was meant to be a diverse and physical display of works by very different authors, and not a unified and cerebral visual demonstration of the curator’s conceptual poetics. To look for immediate evidence of chronological and topographical accuracy in all the individual art projects would be a futile exercise. Not everything in the show was about “dealing with the future” in a straightforward way. At the same time, it was also important to avoid falling into that perpetual trap of futurology: the future as a free-for-all, a non-committal “theory of everything”.
Prophetic Corners was meant to be an exhibition rich in artistic attitudes and strategies. Some of the artworks did more or less directly refer to the idea of “the future” (Annika Eriksson, Carsten Höller, Matts Leiderstam, Mika Taanila and others). There were works dealing with social relations and artist/audience interaction (Hüseyin Alptekin, N55, Thorvaldur Thorsteinsson, Erwin Wurm and others). There were conceptually motivated image-based works, mostly realised in the medium of photography (Miriam Bäckström, Róza El-Hassan, Joachim Koester, Aydan Murtezaoglu, Bruno Serralongue and others). Some works highlighted the relation between visuality and textuality (Erick Beltrán, Haraldur Jónsson, João Penalva, Arturas Raila and others). Accomplished contemporary painting had a presence in the exhibition (Ieva Mediodia, Nina Roos, Praneet Soi), just like the inexplicable or self-explaining object (Henrietta Lehtonen, Lia Perjovschi, Dré Wapenaar). In addition, the curator used the opportunity to focus attention on the Romanian artist Ion Grigorescu, whose complex and intriguing work is too little known in his own country and abroad. The photographs from his artist’s book Iasi (1974 – 1975) were of particular importance to the exhibition, and it seemed to gather many of the conceptual threads laid out between the different projects and venues.
Prophetic Corners brought together artists from different generations and countries. The exhibition had no “geopolitical” programme. Its geography and politics were imaginary. Three specific considerations were made, however. This was the first coherent presentation of leading contemporary artists from the Nordic countries in Romania. It was purposely not a Balkan exhibition. Interesting artists in some of the countries surrounding Romania were left out this time. Instead, there is an attempt at reviving the “dormant” historical link between Iasi/Jassy and Istanbul/Constantinople. (For most of its history until the mid-19th century, the Principality of Moldova was under Ottoman suzerainty.)
Prophetic Corners took place in several venues. Artworks were displayed in all four museums of the Palace of Culture (the Museum of Art, the Museum of History, the Museum of Moldavian Ethnography and the Polytechnic Museum). A “hidden” corridor on the second floor, not usually open to the public, was also turned into an exhibition space. The colossal structure was erected between 1906 and 1925 on the site of the former princely palace, as a court of law and regional administrative headquarters, and is possibly one of the last Neo-Gothic public buildings in Europe. The exhibition continued in the city’s disused Turkish Bath. Originally built in the early 19th century, it was fully refurbished in an orientalist art nouveau style in the early 20th century and partially stripped down to bare brick walls in the late 1980s, in preparation for a complete renovation that never happened. Some artists (Hüseyin Alptekin, Carsten Höller, Thorvaldur Thorsteinsson) also made use of other locations throughout the city centre.
Organizers
Vector Association Iasi
Supported by:
City Hall of Iasi;
Södertörn University College (Stockholm);
Nordic Cultural Foundation (Copenhagen);
IASPIS (Stockholm);
Romanian Ministry of Culture and Cults (Bucharest);
FRAME (Helsinki);
Mondriaan Foundation (Amsterdam);
DCA (Copenhagen);
Rompak - Pakmaya Ltd. (Istanbul/Pascani);
Sindan Cultural Foundation (Bucharest);
Kultur Kontakt Austria (Vienna);
Swiss Cultural Programme in Romania – Pro Helvetia (Bucharest);
Office for Contemporary Art (Oslo);
French Cultural Centre (Iasi);
Goethe-Zentrum (Iasi);
“Moldova” National Museum Consortium (Iasi);
ICCA (Bucharest);
National Museum of Contemporary Art – Kalinderu Medialab (Bucharest)
Swedish Institute (Stockholm);
Rijksakademie van Beeldenden Kunsten (Amsterdam);
Moderna Museet International Programme (Stockholm);
AFAA (Paris);
Central Art Commission (Helsinki),
Ministry of Education and Culture (Reykjavik);
Embassy of Sweden (Bucharest);
Royal Norwegian Embassy (Bucharest);
Romanian National Radio “Romania 3” (Bucharest)
Romanian Billboard Company (Iasi)
Artists
Periferic 6 – “Prophetic Corners”
Biennial for Contemporary Art
Iasi, Romania
30 May – 14 June 2003
Locatii / Venues
The Turkish Bath of Iasi, The Palace of Culture in Iasi, The “Cupola” Gallery in Iasi, French Cultural Center, Goethe Zentrum Iasi
A selection of the works exhibited in Iasi will also be shown at the National Museum of Contemporary Art in Bucharest on June 27—July 25, 2003.
Curator:
Anders Kreuger (SE)
Artists:
Hüseyin Alptekin (TR)
Liliana Basarab (RO)
Erick Beltrán (MX)
Pavel Braila (MD)
Miriam Bäckström (SE)
A K Dolven (N)
Annika Eriksson (SE)
Ion Grigorescu (RO)
Róza El-Hassan (HU)
Haraldur Jónsson (ICL)
Carsten Höller (D)
Joachim Koester (DK)
Henrietta Lehtonen (FI)
Matts Leiderstam (SE)
Ieva Mediodia (LT)
Aydan Murtezaoglu (TR)
N55 (DK/N/SE)
Joao Penalva (P)
Lia Perjovschi (RO)
Quasar (RO)
Arturas Raila (LT)
Nina Roos (FI)
Bruno Serralongue (F)
Praneet Soi (IND)
Mika Taanila (FI)
Thorvaldur Thorsteinsson (ICL)
Dré Wapenaar (NL)
Erwin Wurm (A)
DEALING WITH THE FUTURE
International seminar with curators and academics
Saturday, May 31, 14:00—18:00 at the Goethe Zentrum, Iasi
Moderated by: Matei Bejenaru, Anders Kreuger
Participants:
Maria Lind (Curator, Director Kunstverein Munich);
Alina Mungiu-Pippidi (Politolog, RO)
Irina Sandomirskaja (Profesor Södertörn University College, Stockholm)
Ciprian Mihali (Filosof, professor Universitatea “Babes-Bolyai Cluj-Napoca, Romania)
VIDEO P6
Young video artists from Romania and the Republic of Moldova
The French Cultural Center in Iasi
VIDEO P6 – 1
Romanian Programme, selected by: MATEI BEJENARU, IRINA CIOS (Bucharest), RON SLUIK (Chisinau)
Artists:
DAN ACOSTIOIAEI (Iasi)
DANA BUZATU (Timisoara);
AUREL CORNEA (Iasi);
CRISTINA DAVID (Bucharest);
OANA FELIPOV (Iasi);
NATALIA GHINGHINA (Rm. Valcea);
VALENTIN PUZDERCA (Bucharest);
EUGEN SAVINESCU (Cluj);
MONA VATAMANU & FLOE TUDOR (Bucharest);
VIDEO P6 – 2
Moldavian Programme, selected by: MATEI BEJENARU and LILIA DRAGNEVA (Chisinau)
Artists:
PAVEL BRAILA (Brussels / Chisinau)
LILIA DRAGNEVA & LUCIA MACARI (Chisinau)
VEACESLAV DRUTA (Chisinau)
VALENTIN TARNA (Chisinau)
STEFAN RUSU (Chisinau)
ISTORIA BIENALEI PERIFERIC / HISTORY OF THE PERIFERIC BIENNIAL
Expozitie documentara / Documentary exhibition
Galeria “Cupola” Iasi / The “Cupola” Gallery Iasi
Organizator: Asociatia Vector Iasi / Organized by: Vector Foundation, Iasi
SEARCHING FOR… MENTAL LOCATIONS
Video and sound ambient show
Baia Publica Iasi / The Public Bath of Iasi
Organizatori: MATZE (Bucuresti), OANA FELIPOV (Iasi), DRAGOS PLATON (Iasi),
LILIANA BASARAB (Iasi), AUREL CORNEA (Iasi) /
Organized by MATZE (Bucharest), OANA FELIPOV (Iasi), DRAGOS PLATON (Iasi),
LILIANA BASARAB (Iasi), AUREL CORNEA (Iasi)