<nettime-ann> Opening of PAVILION UNICREDIT contemporary arts centre in Bucharest

[Geert Lovink <geert@xs4all.nl>]

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PAVILION UNICREDIT OFFICIAL OPENING
WITH "STATEMENT" CURATED BY LIA PERJOVSCHI

BUCHAREST, February 19th, 2009: PAVILION UNICREDIT, the centre for  
contemporary art and culture, announces its official opening with the  
exhibition “STATEMENT”, curated by Lia Perjovschi.

The Day’s Agenda:

11.00 - 12.00: Press conference, followed by a presentation tour of  
the centre and the exhibition.

12.00 - 13.00: Q&A Session (Questions & Answers – open discussion).  
Participants: Lia Perjovschi, Eugen Rădescu, Răzvan Ion, Andrei  
Crăciun.

19.00: Official opening of the exhibition "STATEMENT". Curator: Lia  
Perjovschi.

21.00: Punch Glam Party with kitschy pop music video projection.

"STATEMENT" exhibition, curated by Lia Perjovschi
February 19th – April 19th 2009

For the first time in the last twenty years, a bank becomes an art  
centre. A centre in the centre of the city, not at its outskirts, as  
we were used so far by the logic of transition. The spaces for  
contemporary art, had they not been already displaced, closed or  
thrown at the periphery, are becoming smaller and smaller or more  
business-related. The history of the Romanian contemporary art is the  
history of the losses – a place, a market, a man, a few ideas. And,  
as always, an exaggeration is surpassed by an other, and the lack of  
the assorted art units is politically concealed by the ever too big  
and too dependent Central Unit: the museum.

An art magazine created a BIennale and now opens ONE permanent centre  
for the contemporary art.

The midpoint of PAVILION UNICREDIT is not “the show”, as some may  
think, but “the archive/ information”. The main focus here is the  
“the knowledge”, the resource.

Any new place and any new project starts with a STATEMENT. In  
Romanian: declararaţie de credinţă. What the place want to be, and  
what it might be.

STATEMENT is an expositional plan. A route. A process. The storyboard  
of a contemporary art centre nowadays. A conceptual expression for the  
lines of force structuring the intellectual life and the life in  
general. A multidisciplinary programme created with modesty (books,  
newspapers, quotations). A data bank and a possibilities bank. Art is  
not alone. Art is positioned in a cultural, political and scientific  
framework. Works of art admired and then given away as gifts, replicas  
more interesting than the original, hundreds of artists in texts,  
images, postcards. Institutional history in bags. A map of ideas that  
may go wild or may structure itself peacefully. A laboratory where the  
spectators become researchers.

STATEMENT breaks the vicious circle built up out of financial  
humiliation, bureaucratic imbecility, cultural ignorance and lack of  
understanding, institutional autism, the reduction to the state of  
always asking and always being rejected without any explanations, and  
the state of “everything against you”. STATEMENT uses the “Do-It- 
Yourself” resources that the curator-researcher has coalesced for the  
last twenty years.

What do we define as an artistic object? Where should the artistic  
research start and how far can it go? How free is our thinking?
We have become conservative without even knowing it. We wish to be  
avant-gardists, to overthrow things, but we do everything within the  
same logic frame. We complain about the same things. We reiterate the  
same mistakes. Culturally, we are in the tunnel effect.

What can be done?
What if we change the perspective? What if we watch through the both  
ends of the telescope? Here in Universe. Here on Earth. Here in  
Romania. Here in Pavilion.
The resource in STATEMENT is not only the art theorist or the cultural  
philosopher, but also the artist, the astronaut, the string theory  
specialist, the astronomer and the inventor.
Are the artists also inventors? How does the world look when seen from  
outside the world?
Is a T-shirt art? Is a postcard a work of art? What do some images  
tell us when they are downloaded from the Internet and then  
xerocopied? What does the democratic access to information imply? For  
how long can we count on the popular anthology? Why does Second Life  
imitate life?

We know what we are made from (our genome), we know where we are (in  
the Universe), but do we know why? (Lia Perjovschi translated for  
media by Dan Perjovschi).

What is PAVILION UNICREDIT

Most of the 140 million inhabitants from Russia are living in  
Communist block of flats, in apartments they call hruschiovi  
(“khrushchevs”), after the name of the former Communist leader of  
the ’60s, the period when they were built. But the initiator of the  
project was actually Stalin. He imagined them and he also turned the  
project into reality. As a country dominated by Russia for 45 years,  
Romania may pride itself on the same type of habitat. Hruschiovi have  
some small kitchenettes, and this was a big step forward, as compared  
to the so-called kommunalki (they had common kitchens, common  
bathrooms and, sometimes, even common bedrooms. The idea of the New  
Man, who has nothing to hide, went into the background. Today the  
comfort becomes the main propagandistic tool.

PAVILION UNICREDIT is located in Victoria Square, at the ground floor  
of such an apartment building. The afore mentioned space became a  
banking center in 1993 and it has stayed like this for the last 15  
years. The actual building of the edifice started in the years of the  
communist regime and it was concluded five years after the fall of the  
communism. The hruschiovi from the center of Bucharest have witnessed  
the changes of a Stalinist society into a capitalist society, with  
strong social and political marks. PAVILION UNICREDIT uses this space  
for its messages, for its location (right across the center of the  
executive power – the Romanian Government building) and, moreover,  
for its hastily forgotten history. It is a space without an  
extraordinary history, a space of the broken up history, of the  
revolutionary delays. A space for the knowledge and interest in  
society, city and community.

PAVILION UNICREDIT is a work-in-progress independent space, a space  
for the production and research in the fields of visual, discursive  
and performative. It is a space of the critical thinking, and it  
promotes a certain artistic perspective on art and cultural  
institutions, one that implies a socio-political involvement. Still,  
the basic function of the space will remain the concretisation.

PAVILION UNICREDIT will set up every year three-four exhibitions,  
discursive events, a film projection schedule and an informal  
educational program entitled The Free Academy.

The centre will shelter one of the most important areas of information  
in the entire country, which is constituted of the CONTEMPORARY ART  
ARCHIVE (archive created by Lia and Dan Perjovschi) and the PAVILION  
RESOURCE ROOM (a non-archive created by Răzvan Ion and Eugen Rădescu).

The structural design, the architecture of the space was created by  
Adriana Mereuţă, one of the most remarkable Romanian architects. The  
space is an unusual one for a centre of contemporary art and it was  
designed in such a way so as to preserve the elements of the original  
space, of the Communist building. Simultaneously, the architectural  
project added functionality and conception to is utility, while  
maintaining as centre of gravity, in its core, the archives/ 
informations.

About UniCredit Ţiriac Bank

UniCredit Ţiriac Bank is a financial institution whose activities of  
cultural support place a significant emphasis on visual arts, also  
covering the areas of music and literature. The bank financially  
supports the first independent contemporary art and culture centre  
opened under the name of Pavilion UniCredit, being at the same time a  
strategic partener of the Bucharest Biennale of Contemporary Art. The  
cultural component of its sustainability strategy is visible in the  
bank's involvement in long-term projects which it supports as a main  
partner - Anonimul International Film Festival, George Enescu  
International Festival or the metroArt Community Art Project - also  
developing own initiatives as the UniCredit Literary Debut competition  
and the grant program offered to prominent post-graduate students of  
the National Art University in Bucharest.

(for PDF file and more info: http://center.pavilionmagazine.org/en/pressrelease_19jan09.pdf)

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Team

Director: Răzvan Ion
Research Curator: Lia Perjovschi
Coordinator: Andrei Craciun
Project manager: Raluca Pop
Assistant Director: Ioana Nitu
Website/ Software design: Alexandru Enachioaie
Space Design/ Architecture: Adriana Mereuta
Intern: Silvia Vasilescu


Board

Dan Perjovschi
Eugen Radescu (chairman)
Ioana Paun
Felix Vogel

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PAVILION UNICREDIT is the first centre for contemporary art and  
culture from Romania and it is the result of an extended cooperation  
between PAVILION magazine, BUCHAREST BIENNALE and UNICREDIT TIRIAC BANK.

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The projects PAVILION, BUCHAREST BIENNALE, PAVILION UNICREDIT are  
devised and founded by Razvan Ion and Eugen Radescu.

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Visiting address: Şos. Nicolae Titulescu, 1 (Victoria Square),  
Bucharest
E-mail: pavilion@pavilionmagazine.org
Telephone: 031-103-4131

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Opening hours:
Tuesday-Friday: 12.00 – 19.00 p.m.
Saturday-Sunday: 14.00 – 21.00 p.m.
Closed on Mondays

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Supported by: Pilsner Urquell
Media partners: Hotnews, 24Fun, Feeder.ro, Alternativ.ro, 22 magazine.

www.pavilionunicredit.ro
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