Art Opening 9 (repose, falling asleep, peace)

December 11, 17h at Somn Bucharest. 
 

📷 Florin Flueras, Artwork (2023) 

Art Opening invites you to bring works (any medium), practices or just yourselves. The event might go towards exhibition, performance, workshop, intervention, or more likely, a mix of them. 

In a world in which everything fights increasingly harder for our exhausted attention, art constantly “needs to be” more “stimulating” and “engaging”. The closer they look like parties, the more “interesting” art events seem to be. Boring, low or dead times are avoided at all costs. Art Opening 9 is a space and time for allowing ourselves to be at ease with being bored or even falling asleep. At Somn it will be fully possible and desirable to sleep on ourselves while presenting or attending.

If Stilinović was right, and I think he was, that “there is no art without laziness”, that art and labor are opposites, and creativity fully depends on having free, idle time for just lying around, the (art)world is in a very bad spot. Art looks more and more like “projects” and “production”, like everything else. There is a total alignment of art with work, and with the production society. “Inspiration”, “creativity”, “insight” are almost impossible, and that's why they are frowned upon. The frenzy of productivity leaves no space, time and disposition to meditate on implicit frames, perspectives and certitudes, and eventually exit them.

The production society is based on an intensive exploitation and exhaustion of nature, and of ourselves. Being at the point of terminating its natural base, the hyper active society “grows” more and more towards militarism, wars and necropolitics, towards the management of life and especially towards the administration of death. To have any hope of exiting the perspectives and practices that are currently dismantling the world and ourselves – the spiral of “development and progress” towards doom – we need to reclaim some free, boring, death time for laziness, for lying around, sleeping, dreaming. Not only in art but at the level of society, a move towards inaction, rest, peace is needed. It would also be great if someone or something put our production society to sleep. 

Art Opening 9 is also self-referential by taking place in a venue that proposes sleep as a possible response to the production society and its imperatives – “Somn (sleep) is an art space for deep and relaxed departures, for falling asleep to artworld’s commercial, ideological, and spectacle imperatives”. Explicit and implicit limitations determine what kind of art is possible. In non-commercial, state funded art contexts, artists are more and more rewarded for conformism to pre-established themes and perspectives, for interiorizing institutional mindsets. This, together with the entire administrative bureaucracy around a project, can easily exhaust any art drive. The given alternative would be to embrace a commercial mindset, to do sellable objects, images, spectacle – to follow and interiorize art trends, trying to catch some art world waves. This may be an equally effective way to kill your passion. Even speaking of artistic drive, desire or passion might sound off, because a dry professionalization seems to be the implicit normality. In this art closure atmosphere, Art Opening 9 aims to sleep through all that, and eventually dream some temporary zones of possibility and openings at the levels of formats, contents and aesthetics. 

With (until now): Alina Popa, Giles Eldridge, Eliza Trefas, Cosmina Moroșanu, Vlad Anticorp Solar, Adelina Moisoiu, Kira Valentina, Sibi Teodorescu, Victor Podeanu, Smaranda Găbudeanu, Florin Flueras.

At somn.space@gmail.com you can add your name to the list of artists. Or you can just pop up, with or without a proposal, at Art Opening.

Previous Art Openings

Art Opening 8 (on trains)

 

On Romanian trains in the past you never knew what you would encounter, usually an interesting mix of people, stories, situations, a convivial atmosphere, or the possibility to meditatively escape in a dreamy slowly changing reality outside the windows. Now people are more and more into a car type mentality of just being transported efficiently to the destination. The journeys are emptied of the potential of exploration and excitement, they're definitely not anymore as important as the destination. The change in atmosphere corresponds to a capitalist efficient self-enclosed subjectivity, but it is also brought by the obsession with the moving dead spaces that cars are. Cars destroyed not only the social spaces that streets used to be, but they extended their anti-social closed atmosphere everywhere. Counterintuitively they damage the travel, but also the travelers. There is even research showing that the more you drive your car, the more your IQ shrinks, something that you can easily feel on a long drive on the highway. Romania invests 12 times less in train infrastructure than in the ecological disasters called highways, the least in Europe by far. Art Opening 8 is also an escape to the nearest mountains from the capital with the highest density of cars, one of the most polluted in Europe, with the intention of bringing again experience in the journey, and some openings, for us and the fellow travellers on those trains.

Art Opening invites you to bring works (any medium), practices or just yourselves. The event might go towards exhibition, performance, workshop, intervention, or more likely, a mix of them. It aims for temporary zones of possibility, for deviations from conventions and protocols, for art openings at the levels of formats, contents and aesthetics. It appears in art and non-art spaces (museums, shops, airports, trains, parks, homes), creating openings in their ordinary function.

With Eliza Trefas, Adriana Gheorghe, Cătălina Gubandru, Giles Eldridge, Cosmina Moroșan, Vlad Anticorp Solar, Mathis Pfäffli, Diana Rosca, Victor Podeanu, Dan Roșca, lypkhan, Daiana Sargan, Florin Flueras, 

2024 June 8 on the trains: Bucharest - Sinaia - Bucharest. And a parallel opening by Antonija Livingstone on the trains in Brooklyn NY.

Previous Art Opening events

 

 

Art Opening 7 – Group Therapy

As usual at Art Opening, you're invited to bring works (any medium), practices or just yourselves. And as usual, the event might go towards exhibition, performance, workshop, discussion, but this time maybe also towards a more or less explicit group therapy. Art Opening aims for temporary zones of possibility, for art openings at the levels of formats, contents, functions and aesthetics.

As artists, we might be disappointed with artworld's trends and environments. We might suffer from lack of invitations. Maybe we feel unrecognised, unseen. Or maybe we're "successful" and yet we feel that the institutional machine kills us inside. Maybe we lost our trust in what we do. Maybe we cannot anymore stand the drain of applications, of bureaucracy. Maybe we're burned out. Maybe we're stuck. Maybe we lost our passion. Maybe we ask ourselves what's the point? Or maybe we are thriving and can inspire others. As public maybe we lost interest in art, we might see it as too removed from our embodied experience and too much ideology and spectacle. Or maybe we love it and want to stay close. And probably we all have or can think of some practices, tools, tricks, thoughts, perspectives, artworks that can help a bit with the ills of our (art)worlds.

Artists: Cătălina Gubandru, Giles Eldridge, Alina Popa, Ana-Maria Pop, Eliza Trefas, Adriana Gheorghe, Sibi Teodorescu, Cosmina Moroșan & Anticorp Solar, Virginia Negru, Kira Valentina, Smaranda Gabudeanu, Denisa Duran, Florin Flueras.

At unsorcery@gmail.com you can add your name to the list of artists. Or you can just pop up, with or without a proposal, at Art Opening.

11 March 2023 @ Somn Bucharest.

 

 Previously at Art Opening

Art Opening 6 – at home

Art Opening 6 takes place at home. You're invited to bring works (any medium), practices or just yourselves. The event might go towards exhibition, performance, workshop, discussion, or more likely, a mix of them. Art Opening aims for temporary zones of possibility, for art openings at the levels of formats, contents and aesthetics.  

Here, in the Eastern Europe the institutionalized art was so ideologically dogmatic that certain artists preferred to completely avoid it and present their work in their own homes. We might not be there again, yet in non-commercial, public financed art contexts there is increasingly less space to ask questions, explore or create – you need to conform to pre-established themes and perspectives and interiorize bureaucratic mindsets more and more. This, together with the entire administrative bureaucracy around a project, can easily exhaust your artistic drive. The given alternative would be to embrace a commercial mindset, to do sellable objects, images, spectacle – to follow and interiorize art trends, trying to catch some art world waves. This may be an equally effective way to kill your passion. Even speaking of artistic drive, desire or passion might sound off or outdated, because a dry professionalization seems to be the implicit normality. In this atmosphere, home presenting art might be a timely art opening for some of us.

Artists: Adriana Gheorghe, Alina Popa, Andreea David, Cătălina Gubandru, Cătălin Diaconu, Corina Mitrovici, Cosmina Moroșan & Anticorp Solar, Edoardo Sansonne, Eliza Trefas, Florin Flueras, Giles Eldridge, Horațiu Lipot, Iulia Mărăcine & Smaranda Găbudeanu, Martina Piazzi, Sibi Teodorescu, Silvia Costin.

Other Art Openings

 (15 October 2022)