Sights and Sounds: Romania
Sights and Sounds: Romania features new work by Anca Benera and Arnold Estefan, Irina Botea, Pavel Brăila, and Mona Vătămanu and Florin Tudor, selected by Daria Ghiu.
These four videos share a certain Romanian sensibility: an interest in assembling and installing history. The works are infused with hints of the historical avant-gardes whose vestiges and heritage remain vividly alive there. Anca Benera and Arnold Estefan use official local histories as material for a filmed performance that crashes and transforms them in a cacophonous Dada act. Irina Botea constructs a national anthem—a well-preserved and exhausted stereotype—to reveal an act of national identity deconstruction, at once beautiful and almost ridiculous. Pavel Brăila carefully portrays the one-day winter life of Chișinău, capital of Moldova, wielding the tools of a post-plein-air painter to simultaneously veil and unveil the city. The mute film of Mona Vătămanu and Florin Tudor features children’s play, an ephemeral, unaware enactment of history and warfare. Their simple, poetic gesture implies a promise—the promise of renewal.
Daria Ghiu
Curator
Daria Ghiu (b. Bucharest, 1983) is a PhD candidate at the National University of Arts in Bucharest, with a thesis on the history of the Romanian Pavilion at the Venice Biennale. An art critic, she publishes reviews in Romanian and international art magazines such as Arta, Idea arts+society, Artforum.com (Critics’ Picks section), TurnOnArt.com, Art Press, and Spike, and is a permanent collaborator with Romanian Cultural Public Radio. In 2013 she contributed to the catalogue of the exhibition Romanian Scenes at Espace Culturel Louis Vuitton Paris. In the same year she curated In This Pavilion One Can See Art: Romania in Venice, 89 Years with La Biennale at tranzit.ro/Bucharest.
About Sights and Sounds: Global Film and Video
This long-term series offers a rotating selection of vigorous film and video works by contemporary artists from around the world — with a particular emphasis on work being made outside western Europe and the United States.
Sights and Sounds: Global Film and Video is a long-term presentation of new film and video works made in the sphere of the visual arts. The series offers a rotating selection of vigorous works by contemporary artists from around the world. It introduces New York audiences to the latest developments in filmmaking within the art context and underlines the Jewish Museum’s holistic and global approach to the understanding and presentation of art and culture.
Sights and Sounds takes advantage of the straightforward way film and video travel: shipped on discs or streamed online, these works provide an instant connection to new creative practices from even the most remote locations.
Twenty-five international curators have selected new film and video work from their respective regions of the world—ranging from Argentina to Vietnam, Nigeria to Romania, New Zealand to China, and many places in between. Their picks are screened for one month each in the museum’s media center, which has been turned into a miniature cinema for the occasion.
The works in Sights and Sounds touch on themes significant to both Jewish culture and universal human experience: spirituality, exile, language, conflict, family, humor, history. The series creates a broad network of artistic expression and curatorial perspectives that takes stock of what is happening in film and video art at this moment in time across the globe—with a particular emphasis on work being made outside western Europe and the United States.
Sights and Sounds will culminate with a selection of highlights from the series. One work from each country will be presented in the gallery from February 5, 2016 to June 30, 2016.
Jens Hoffmann
Deputy Director
Exhibitions and Public Programs
Installation view of Sights and Sounds: Global Film and Video in the Goodkind Media Center. Photo by David Heald.
Exhibition highlights
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Anca Benera and Arnold Estefan, still from Pacta Sunt Servanda (Agreements Must Be Kept), 2012, HD video, sound, 16 min., 37 sec. Artwork © Anca Benera and Arnold Estefan
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Irina Botea, still from Before a National Anthem, 2010, video, sound, 10 min., 55 sec. Artwork © Irina Botea
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Pavel Brăila, still from Chișinău—City Difficult to Pronounce. Winter, 2011, HD video, sound, 21 min., 43 sec. Artwork © Pavel Brăila
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Mona Vătămanu and Florin Tudor, still from Rite of Spring, 2010, super 8 film, 7 min., 51 sec. Artwork © Mona Vătămanu and Florin Tudor