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)

Art Opening 5 (at the airport)

 

Art Opening proposes to meet in one of the few places where it is still possible without exclusion, at the airport. You're invited 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. Art Opening appears uninvited in art and non-art spaces, adding an extra layer to their ordinary function – producing meetings between two types of audiences, attentions, situations, performers.

Explicit and implicit restrictions determine what kind of art is possible, by whom, for whom, if and how we can be together. Artists are more and more rewarded for conformism, for interiorizing institutional mindsets, unquestionable "correct stances" and pre-established perspectives. In this art closure atmosphere, Art Opening aims for temporary zones of possibility, for art openings at the levels of formats, contents and aesthetics.

One of art's aims is to question the normal and to explore alternatives, to deviate from conventions, regulations, measures, restrictions, mandates and protocols. In a time when bodies are seen as sources of infection and disease, and we're preferred as online disembodied presences, turned against each other, Art Opening is a reminder that bodies are also sources of affects, intuitions, connection, presence, joy, creativity, love, sensibility, without which, there is no 'life' to be saved.

*You can disagree, and still be very welcomed to Art Opening. Against the current atmosphere, Art Opening embraces the plurality of views.

With Bogdan Balan, Silvia Costin, Mihai Dragomir, Giles Eldridge, Florin Flueras, Adriana Gheorghe, Catalina Gubandru, Dan Roșca, Diana Rosca, Sibi Teodorescu, Eliza Trefas.  

 

Previous Art Openings

📷 Bogdan Bălan, Cătălina Gubandru, Eliza Trefas, Florin Flueras. 

Art Opening 4 – Conspiratio

Conspiratio is an early Christian practice of breathing into each others’ mouths, a mouth-to-mouth kiss through which each one contributes of his own spirit to create a spiritual community. Illich saw conspiratio as a basic "somatic interchange" that creates "a unity which is manifest in the world but never belongs to it, a unity always out of the reach of merely instrumental human purposes." Conspiratio amplifies the metaphysical quality of our bodiliness, that "something in our bodily encounter, which is outside of this world in which we now are."

We can do conspiratio theory and practice together, after we figure out what they could be nowadays. Unless there is a strong desire for the old ritual, we will look for contemporary conspiratio – for somatic ways of deviating from our realities in order to meet, despite the extraordinary current disembodiment. And we can reflect together on anything conspiratio related, from the current extreme replacement of our embodied experience by spectacle, to "conspiracy theories" in the sense of Miller's definition: "something that if true, you couldn't handle it", and other theories that can deeply challenge our reality formation. 

Not long ago art that recycles non-controversial certitudes, or transmits the ‘correct’ messages about how we should think, or fits too well on the market, in governmental funding schemes, institutional requirements or art trends, was called "safe". "Safe" was equivalent to conformist, mediocre art. In a society in which "safety first" is the imposed ideology, Conspiratio says "safety third", and we can look together for the other two more important things.

Feel free to do Conspiratio in your community too. 

At Somn Bucharest, 11 December 2021