In 2018, ODD is a partner in the Meetfactory Arists-in-Residency project The New Dictionary of Old Ideas, a network of independent cultural institutions within Central and Eastern Europe. The platform we aim to create comes along with the process of cultural exchange and intense research of our common identity. Through political issues, visual culture, art theory, and the history of the region, we wish to explore Central Europe as an intriguing phenomenon.
The project developed by ODD in this context revolves around the notion of the parasite; the 4 artists look at contemporary Europe as a symbiotic organism where East and West cannot be told apart: each one leeches on the other, each one depends on the other to survive emotionally, politically and economically. Designed as an online app hosted by etho.tk through a peer-to-peer browser, the project unfolds, both visually and conceptually, the information density behind this symbiotic process.
Partner Institutions:
HIT Gallery / Bratislava, Slovakia
Visual Culture Research Centre / Kyiv, Ukraine
FKSE Studio of Young Artists Association / Budapest, Hungary
Trafostacja Sztuki / Szczecin, Poland
tranzit.at / Vienna, Austria
ODD / Bucharest, Romania
Participants:
Andrej Žabkay, Erik Janeček, Kata Mach, Dora Kenderová, Serhiy Klymko, Oleksiy Radynski, David Chichkan, Oleksander Pavlov, Klára Rudas, Bence Pálinkás, Miklós Zsámboki, Eszter Őze, Monika Szpener, Stanisław Ruksza, Andrzej Wasilewski, Mikołaj Iwański, Georg Schöllhammer, Hedwig Saxenhuber, Tanja Widman, Johannes Porsch, Nita Mocanu, Cristina Bogdan, Marius Stoica, Vasile Leac.
Schedule:
MeetFactory residences – February – November 2018
Project launching + VCRC and tranzit.at – 28th of March 2018
Open studios MeetFactory – 13th of April 2018
Public event + FKSE presentation – 15th of May 2018
Open studios MeetFactory – 9th of June 2018
Open studios MeetFactory – 1st of August 2018
Public event + Trafostacja Sztuki project presentation – 9th of August 2018
Open Studios MeetFactory – 21st of September 2018
Public event + HIT Gallery presentation – 10th of October 2018
Symposium – 21–23rd of November 2018
Publication – February 2019
Concept of the project by:
Lucia Kvočáková & Piotr Sikora, curators of AiR program MeetFactory
Biographies
Cristina Bogdan
Cristina Bogdan is a researcher, curator, editor and lecturer. Born 1985, Bucharest, where she lives and works. In 2014, she founded ODD and is director and main curator of the initiative. She is also the founder and online editor of Revista ARTA, concerned with mapping Romanian contemporary art, as well as the editor of two printed issues of the magazine (2012, on British Art; 2017, on Hybrids).
Vasile Leac
Artist and poet, lives and works between Arad and Bucharest. He has published poetry books, most of them in several revised editions, a few of them renegated; he is a founding member of the literary group Celebrul Animal and of the Ca și Cum magazine. In 2012, together with Bianca Baila, he set up in Timișoara the MOI/Museum of Interior Order. He tok part in the Awaiting Spaces 2013 platform with the project Sugar Factory Oven. Curator of the W.A.D. (The Dependent Artist’s Weekend) event in Arad in 2014. Director of The Village Drones l, 2014; The Village Drones ll, 2015; Descriptive Trajectories with Intruder, for Expanded Space, 2016.
“I have always wanted to write poems for two or three slightly offbeat astronauts, barely having a pulse; drifting through space, without a certain destination. I want you to imagine the smile of that astronaut, sitting there, at a table by the porthole; sipping his drink – what might that be? After reading you feel like the poem rises on tiptoes; kisses your cheek; then runs away; it stops at a distance; turns around and laughs in your face, like a cunning child whom you feel knows the secret of happiness.”
Nita Mocanu
Nita Mocanu (b.1977) is an art teacher and visual artist. She lives and works in Arad (Romania).
In her works, she combines a personal poetic with social commitment, visible through the period of video activism with the D Media group. Her more recent works represent her new interest in the analysis of connections between body, the theories of consciousness, perception, a world of objects, the construction of status quo, language, ecology and the new materialism. She works mostly with text, photography, video art and video performance.
Selected exhibitions: Art Encounters Contemporary Art Biennial, Timisoara (2017), Interstitial space, ODD Gallery, Bucharest (2017); Narrating images / Imagining narrations, Domino Gallery – The Paintbrush Factory, Cluj- Napoca (2017); DADADA Media Arts Festival, Arad Art Museum (2016); Expanded Space / The Grey Area, Bucharest (2016); Notes on Tomorrow – CreArt Europe, Mapu Kaunas, LI / Kristiansand City Hall / Aveiro Captaincy (2016); kristallin#22, Atelierhaus Salzamt, Linz (2015); Diary of a discussion on education and other things, MAGMA Art Space, Sf. Gheorghe and Consent Studio, Cluj-Napoca (2014, solo); Evasive diary, Kinema Ikon Serial/Season 1, Arad Art Museum (2014, solo); European Travelers. Art from Cluj Today, Műcsarnok Kunsthalle, Budapest, HU (2012).
Marius Stoica
Marius Stoica (b. 1980) is a graduate of philosophy, currently a librarian. He defines his works as practices of Bataille’s inner experience – marginal, out of focus, de-anthropomorphized vitalism. From philosophy and art zine Subliminalia, through experimental video documentary (with Nita Mocanu) and video activism (with D Media NGO), to quasi-shamanic weblog and the sound intervention project Monocore – all these are ways to test the creeping of life and the withdrawal of objects.
He is also an open source enthusiast not because it empowers his work but because it further complexifies and obscures it.
From 2016 he started the collaborative online project etho.tk mixing philosophy, art and technology and aiming to express through a variety of artistic approaches (installation, video performance, net-art) a set of philosophical ideas circumscribed to speculative realism and orbiting around the concept of etho-tecture (the invisible, beaten and well-worn pathways of communication between things and within the networks of things).