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Bureau D’Études
The Ring, World Government, extract from publications, maps, courtesy Bucharest Biennale & artist,
photo: Alexandra Mihalcea
Ashley Hunt
Prison Map, 2003, print, 1,500 take away copies, 60 × 45 cm, courtesy Bucharest Biennale & artist,
photo: Alexandra Mihalcea
Lukas Einsele
One Step Beyond, texts, images, and multimedia formats, 2005, courtesy Bucharest Biennale & artist,
photo: Alexandra Mihalcea
groups of high-school visitors and several events parallel to the exhibition
itself, well thought of, but which unfortunately didn’t succeed
in gathering a crowd, maintaining the appearance of an ever present
and already monotone, familiar, simulated meeting of “us“ and
“ours“), that they wish to be a structure meant to “break the cultural
isolation“ (even by the very fact that the number of Romanian artists
at the BB3 was quite small, only three, Lia Perjovschi, Cezar Læzærescu
and Adrian Matei) and to create a dialog between the local and the
global, with a systematically formed public.
On the existing background, BB is still an event meant for very few.
To be successful due to a contemporary art event or at least to succeed
in acquiring a certain normalization in attending contemporary
art in the society you place yourself in is an intricate and long formative
process, and more so in an eastern space like Romania and
Bucharest.
The BB raises its own public by “aerating“ with art and thus spacing
not only an urban framework, but also a mental framework both
crowded and hard to breathe in. The map intervenes into territory.
The Map As an “Intercept“: The Message is the Noise
The BB3 takes one step further. It places itself on a “still warmish“,
passive artistic scene, as Ræzvan Ion calls it in an interview 2 taken,
along with Eugen Rædescu, to the curators of this edition, the Swedish
Jan-Erik Lundström and Johan Sjöström (the former, manager of
BildMuseet in Umeå, a contemporary art and visual culture museum
in Sweden, the latter, curator at the same museum). It commits,
“it take over“ this space by the fact that every artistic project created
here has social-political implications, that it uses the “energy“ and
the eclecticism of Bucharest as an instrument (an energy of oppositions
and disputes, at the level of the divided contemporary art
scene of Bucharest), its “stormy history (or hysteria)” (Eugen Rædescu),
by deciding that the BB3 topic should be mapping the contemporary.
Choosing the mapping of today’s world as a topic for a biennial
which is still self-legitimating and, moreover, launched in a process
of “alphabetizing“ the local contemporary public, which aims
to “encourage the cartographic alphabetization“, as the curators
defined at one point their action, means the inevitable alphabetization
which such an event should perform. That is because, trying
to define the extensive territory of the biennials, we could say that
these are mappings of the space which produces them, maps of the
contemporary world, inter-maps of equally the present artistic, social
and political life, intercepts of present societies. The biennials have
the capacity to draw a society, to mark it, to define its present state
of affairs. Or to choose mapping as a topic equals with the very legitimization
of the process, as well as with the attempt to open widely
the eyes of the uninformed public to a “policy of knowledge“
(“A very important aspect of BB3 is producing knowledge as a comprehensive
definition“, says Johan Sjöström during the same interview).
The contemporary art biennials, thus incipiently BB3, “listen”
to society and “put it in a message“. The concept of intercept, proposed
by the young philosopher Mehdi Belhaj Kacem, refers to the
very “rumour-like“, diffuse-auditory aspect which contemporary art
implies when relating to reality.
Self-Mapping of the Art: The Meta-Biennial
It is interesting to notice the international background which this
third edition of the Bucharest International Contemporary Art Biennale
is set in. The second oldest biennial in the world after the Venice
one, the São Paulo Biennale, which has reached the 28th edition and
which is taking place this year, between October 26 and December
6, is taking a “break” 3 in its normality and coherence for a moment
of critique and self-reflection, it stops for a “meta-biennial“ edition.
Ivo Mesquita and Ana Paula Cohen, this edition’s curators, trigger
a mechanism meant to analyze the global phenomenon of the biennials,
to revaluate its objectives and mistakes, starting from the two
fundamental missions which Lourival Gomes Machado, the artistic
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