With the project The Other Side of the Romanian Avant-garde: Film, Photography, Performance, featuring art critic and curator Igor Mocanu, the Romanian Cultural Institute in New York (RCINY) opens a series of events celebrating multiple dimensions of the Romanian avant-garde of the 20th century. This series will continue in 2016. Nonetheless, as the title suggests, this project is conceived to highlight those fields of the Romanian avant-garde that are less or not known – film, photography, performance -, considering that most scholars have explored until now mainly the avant-garde literature and visual arts. This multifaceted project, based on the original topic of Igor Mocanu’s research, will take place at RCINY on April 3, 2015, at 7 pm, consists of three events, complementary to each other: screening of archive films “excavated” by Igor Mocanu in National Film Archive of Romania and from the National Dance Center Bucharest, the opening of a documentary photography show curated by Igor Mocanu, and his conference.
Speaking about the upcoming exhibition, Igor Mocanu confesses: “Most avant-garde authors seem to have theorized and created beyond the borders of art genres. The same artists that where labeled until recently exclusively as poets or painters turned out to be, at the same time, ardent theorists of the film culture (Ion Calugaru – author of the first Chaplin biography, Sasa Pana, Marcel Iancu, Filip Corsa, Barbu Florian) or even active participants in the cinema industry (Benjamin Fondane, Eli Lotar), authors of photomontages, collages or artistic photography (Titina Capitanescu, Jean David, Filip Brunea-Fox), music theorists (Sasa Pana) or real modern music composers (Urmuz), performers (Gherasim Luca) and choreographers (Lizica Codreanu), modern dance theorists (Alexandru Assan) and promoters of exotic art (Filip Brunea-Fox, Corneliu Mihailescu). This exhibition aims therefore to emphasize this alternative, parallel history of the avant-garde in Romania.”
Among artists on display (alphabetically ordered): Aurel Baugh, Geo Bogza, Theodore Brauner, Filip Brunea-Fox, Titina Capitanescu, Irina Codreanu, Lizica Codreanu, Filip Corsa, Jean David, Barbu Florian, Benjamin Fondane, Marcel Iancu, Gherasim Luca, M.H. Maxy, Gellu Naum, Sasa Pana, Jules Perahim, Milita Petrascu, Claude Sernet, Tristan Tzara, Urmuz.
Igor Mocanu (b. 1984, Cantemir, Republic of Moldova) is a PhD candidate at the National University of Arts in Bucharest, Department of History and Theory of Arts, with the thesis Political Avant-garde. The other side of the Romanian Avant-garde in social, political and economic documents (coordinated by Professor Ruxandra Demetrescu), in which he develops his master’s degree dissertation on a similar topic. He publishes essays and articles in various journals and magazines from Romania and abroad. He curated several exhibitions of modern and contemporary art, among them the project Avant-garde revisited. European Avant-garde in the National Film Archive of Romania (ANFR, Romanian Cinematheque, Eforie Hall / “Jean Georgescu”, 2012-2014). He supervised the anthology 1984. The last generation of the Romanian Communism (UNIBUC, 2008), he participated in the literary-visual project Rubik (Polirom, 2008), and published several contributions in the volumes CriticAtac. Anthology I (Cartier, 2011), See what we do! (Pionier Press, 2013), Infra-Black (Aius, 2014), and Close-up: Post-Transition Writings (Artyčok TV, 2014). He currently works as an editor for „Arta” magazine, published by the Romanian Artists’ Association, and as Head of Research for the National Dance Center – Bucharest.
With the support of: National Film Archive of Romania (ANFR); National Dance Center Bucharest (CNDB).
