ROOMS

The Rooms exhibition is a group show in which artists self-curated their own shows by each “inhabiting” one room of the Quadro 21 Gallery.

The original intention of the exhibition which was planned to open in May is to give back to each artist the main voice in their exhibition and thus to rethink the artist-gallery-curator relationship. Thus, the intention of the show is to address the problematic net of today’s artworld, the status of the art and artist in it.

However, the lookdown caused not only the delay of the exhibition but surely had an influence also on the meanings it can gather.

Four artists from Romania, Netherlands and Germany, from different generations and working in a variety of mediums will open their rooms for the visitor. Whether these rooms are thought as an existential space, open studio or metaphors of the universe, they will surely represent precise statements on how the artists live, create and position themselves at this specific and challenging moment in history.

ALEXANDRU ANTIK SÁNDOR Q&A

Our purpose in staging this exhibition was to give artists an opportunity to curate their own exhibitions, each in one room of the gallery. How did you approach this invitation? 

Thank you for inviting me to take part in this exhibition. The project has given me an opportunity to create a new video installation, a freestanding work, without having to take account of a theme laid down by a curator, and relatively isolated from the works of other artists represented in the exhibition. 

I will attempt to say something about my work Camera suspinelor (The Room of Sighs). I have used sequences from well-known films and have reworked them to fit in with the video installation concept. In terms of content, the scenes employed have been taken out of their original context and the speech in them has been cut to a minimum. The installation presents female characters living their lives on their own, isolated in space-time capsules. The scenes suggest events happening at a monotonous pace. Slow, repetitive sequences, movements slowed down so that they become static images, the action of the film breaks up into its own freeze frames, the facial features of the female characters sometimes freeze into static images, at other times the sequences become silent. An experiment that lies between film and installation. It is no accident that the installation presents scenes from famous Ingmar Bergman films and Chris Marker’s film. Both directors were an inspiration to the concept of my installation. But here the scope of the experiment is a different one, my purpose being to create an audio-visual video installation that was specific to this artistic genre. To put it more concretely, the objectives of the project were to create a spatial structure with an ambient setting and a set of films playing constantly in the exhibition, and to create a 3D sound that is synchronised with the visual element.

The initial intention of the exhibition, which was to address the problematic relationship between artist, curator and gallery, suddenly took on a new level of interest when the lockdown came into effect. Being isolated in one’s own room was now no longer simply a working situation in a gallery but also a compulsory existential situation. What kind of influence did quarantine have on you as a person and as an artist? 

As regards my being restricted temporally and spatially as a consequence of the Covid 19 pandemic, I need to tell you that it did not affect me as the kind of existential shock that would directly generate a work on this subject. The issue addressed in The Room of Sighs is not a new one. For some people, being alone is painful; for others, it is necessary. As an artist I do not complain when I have to be alone. I actually need this at some points in my creative work, and not only then. 

Alexandru Antik Sándor (Reghin, 1950) is a Cluj-based artist whose work revolves around experimental activity, mainly in the fields of performance, installation and multimedia art. He has been a constant presence on the Romanian art scene since the end of the 1970s, when he was a member of the Atelier 35 movement of young artists. Since 1990 he has participated in numerous exhibitions of performance and multimedia art both in Romania and abroad. 

He created the Utopia in Art show broadcast on TVR Cluj in 1998-9. He has been an editor of the contemporary art journal Balkon (1999-2002) and a visual editor of the political culture journal Provincia (2001-2002), and until this year he taught in the Arts Department of Partium Christian University, Oradea.

LORENA COCIONI Q&A

Our purpose in staging this exhibition was to give artists an opportunity to curate their own exhibitions, each in one room of the gallery. How did you approach this invitation? 

Your proposal arrived just at the point at which I had already begun to make a careful analysis of the idea of personal space and a woman’s need for privacy and security. Being someone who spends the majority of their time in this personal space and operates best there, I was more interested in discovering the history this example of comfort and privilege had made for itself in society and social classes than in arguments about the stages through which primitive man had evolved. 

Then I learned that the history of the boudoir begins in the early 1700s as a term that referred to a distinctly female space. As the exclusively male study cabinet already existed in almost every bourgeois house, the boudoir was most likely a woman initiative to also have a room of her own. Its roots in the French verb bouder – meaning to sulk or pout – indicate that it was a gendered space that served as a refuge for women where they could be isolated, on the pretext that it gave them an opportunity for privacy. The association of this room with delicacy and privacy suggests that it was first intended as a place in which to feel, but turned out to be planned rather to sequester an unwanted mood. 

The boudoir accommodated a variety of activities, being the space in which a woman could read and could prepare, bath, dress and adorn herself. Later, during more liberal times, it was to become a place for clandestine meetings and sexual seduction. Impelled by an impulse to make a collection of natural objects in their personal spaces, women gradually used them as places in which to construct their own universes. Therefore, the boudoir slightly became similar with a “cabinet of curiosities”. 

The initial intention of the exhibition, which was to address the problematic relationship between artist, curator and gallery, suddenly took on a new level of interest when the lockdown came into effect. Being isolated in one’s own room was now no longer simply a working situation in a gallery but also a compulsory existential situation. What kind of influence did quarantine have on you as a person and as an artist? 

The new circumstances imposed by the pandemic naturally brought certain fears with them but also had a beneficial effect. This may also have been a self-defence mechanism, but I found myself being far more concerned with what was closest to me, in my shell. When spending time by myself became more than a voluntary choice, I focused more on my relationship with my own body and feelings than I had done previously. 

As I was already working on this project, it struck me as a happy accident of time that the new context put me in real-life situations that I had already begun to analyse from a theoretical perspective. 

Lorena Maria Cocioni (1995, Constanța) studied in the Graphics department of the University of Art and Design, Cluj-Napoca, completing her master’s there in 2019. 

Cocioni takes inspiration from the world around her, being interested in the ritual involved in everyday actions such as washing, combing one’s hair and taking care of one’s body. She is extremely versatile in the materials she uses, having worked in ceramics, soap, polystyrene, cement, glass, feathers and other media in her attempt to select the optimal medium of expression.

MAJE MELLIN Q&A

Our purpose in staging this exhibition was to give artists an opportunity to curate their own exhibitions, each in one room of the gallery. How did you approach this invitation?

In speaking about the process of showing my own work, or staging an exhibition together with other artists, as I am doing now with Bernice, I would not use the term curating. When I am asked to contribute a specific work to a curated group exhibition, without being involved in the exhibition-making process, this means that I have no influence over the environment, which does something to my work in one way or another. (That can be interesting as well.) In this case, the concept of “rooms” gives me space to think of the room and the objects as actors doing something with each other, which contrasts with perceiving an object/artwork as a dead, self-contained entity. I am a person who speaks very little about their work until it is finished; I guess language is just not my prime mode of accessing things.

You knew that Bernice and I wanted to show works together, and I am glad you asked us if we wanted to participate in this exhibition. Thinking about the rooms in the gallery, I was most interested in the cellar. At that time I was working on a sculpture (“head”) that I see as a moment frozen in time: An axe, positioned on a table, is splitting a tree trunk and by so doing is itself being split. Putting this work in the cellar of the gallery, which is the space in the building that has probably undergone the least change since the house was built, was for me the perfect match. A cellar is like a kind of time capsule, storing food and objects that sometimes stay untouched for years.

I was also curious about how the object would be encountered differently in a “functional room” from in the more standard exhibition spaces. We have now moved to a different room in the gallery, but this is how it started.

The initial intention of the exhibition, which was to address the problematic relationship between artist, curator and gallery, suddenly took on a new level of interest when the lockdown came into effect. Being isolated in one’s own room was now no longer simply a working situation in a gallery but also a compulsory existential situation. What kind of influence did quarantine have on you as a person and as an artist?

There was no total lockdown in Germany, which meant I was still allowed to go to the studio and the garden and to leave the city. I think in terms of rooms the difference was much greater for students and people with a shared working space. For me what was harder was not meeting people, friends and family, and not being able to travel. Bernice and I could communicate only through video-call, emails, and so on. In a way I could concentrate on my work much better because there were very few distractions. But that’s something I only realized later. In those first weeks, I was like most people - just worried about what was happening and trying to understand it. In the studio I was starting to work on a sculpture that I call “manifests for future beings” for which I made a different egg every day. The idea for the work was older but it came back to me at that time. How did it affect me and my way of working in general? Maybe I will be able to answer that question in three years’ time.

Maje Mellin (1991, Gehrden, Germany) is a Hanover-based multimedia artist whose work focuses on presenting the thin, vanishing borderline between different dimensions of perception. Starting in 2011, she studied visual arts at Yrkeshögskolan Novia in Nykarleby/Uusiikaarleppyy, Finland, and subsequently free arts at the Hochschule für bildende Künste, Brunswick (2012-2017). She has served residency programmes at HANGAR Centro de Investigaçao Artística in Lisbon and a Pilot Residency at Fabrica de Pensule, Cluj-Napoca. With a series of both solo and group exhibitions to her credit, Maje Mellin creates a poetic universe in which multiple media (drawings, sculpture, audio/video installation) communicate, resulting in an immersive experience.

BERNICE NAUTA Q&A

Our purpose in staging this exhibition was to give artists an opportunity to curate their own exhibitions, each in one room of the gallery. How did you approach this invitation?

This is an interesting concept, because there is a double layer of curating happening. The gallery curated the artists, so why were they brought together? Do they have something in common? All of them will create their own solo exhibitions within the structure of a group show; Maje and I are the only ones to be sharing a room. I also like the fact that the show is called Rooms, because this has a more domestic connotation for me than, for example, ‘space’ or ‘gallery’. I think the works that Maje and I have brought together are also related to domestic objects. They are objects that exist inside and outside of the home, so for me they also relate to the idea of inside-outside.

Both Maje and I run an off-space / residency (Billytown - the Kitchen Space in The Hague, and NIKI in Hanover), which makes us used to taking some kind of ‘curatorial’ role, although I always try to avoid that term for what I do at the off-space I co-run.

The initial intention of the exhibition, which was to address the problematic relationship between artist, curator and gallery, suddenly took on a new level of interest when the lockdown came into effect. Being isolated in one’s own room was now no longer simply a working situation in a gallery but also a compulsory existential situation. What kind of influence did quarantine have on you as a person and as an artist?

Lockdown had quite a big impact on me, to be honest. The pace of my life became more comfortable. I now live a slower life, which actually feels better to me. If I think back to the pace at which I lived before, it was so intense. So many projects, social obligations, journeys, meetings, exhibition openings, parties, jobs, besides working in the studio. Suddenly this turned into having so much time to just be at home, think, eat, drink, and work in the studio. It’s like Philip Guston’s paintingPainting, Smoking, Eating(1972). It was an intense time for me, honestly, both personally and financially. But it also turned out to be a nice time with so much space to work in the studio, without deadlines, stress, obligations. This really gave me some kind of feeling of sanity.

Also, I started to treat these two rooms, studio and home, with a lot more care, and did drawings of a figure who becomes the room that they inhabit. Recently I spoke with a friend, Robbie, who is currently staying in different rooms in Amsterdam because his own house is under construction. He told me how he really noticed that all these different rooms have an influence on his behaviour. It's a combination of the architecture, the facilities and the objects inside the room. I thought that was very interesting, how rooms exert a certain degree of agency over humans. How to a certain extent they dictate our behaviour. I think it's also interesting to think about how the white cube or art space was intended to be a ‘neutral’ room, which doesn’t dictate, but in the end people have adopted conditioned ways of behaving even in there.

Bernice Nauta (1991, Deventer, Netherlands) is a Dutch visual artist who studied at the Royal Academy of Art in The Hague. She attended the residency programmes at Ampelhaus, Oranienbaum, Orbital Residency, Cantabria and the European Ceramic Work Centre, Oisterwijk.

With a number of both solo and group exhibitions, she focuses on showcasing a multitude of sides of the same character, besides thought experiments. In her works, she perceives the complexity of a persona and “how one can be self-contradictory and change over time”.

Organising team: Andreea Cărăușu, Diana Roșca, Sebestyén Székely, Hunor Vécsei

Communication: Theia Golea

Technical assistant: Matei Toșa

Interns: Adriana Bicăzan, Iarina Dănăilă, Nicoleta Popescu

Design: Bold Studio