The Romanian Cultural Institute in Tel Aviv invites you this autumn to an event of a very special nature. Documentary films, a book, paintings, installations are created and used by the Romanian artist Ştefan Constantinescu in order to tell a complex story, conveying official and personal ideas or perspectives, realities of different periods of time.
Stefan Constantinescu is representing Romania at this years' Venice Biennial, 7 June-22 November 2009, with two video works: Trolleybus 92, 2009 (8 min), and The Passage, 2005 (62 min) (both in Romanian with English subtitles). On September 30 these films will be shown at the Contemporary Centre for Art in Tel Aviv with an introduction by the artist. Trolleybus 92 is a fiction film. It was shot during the spring of 2009 in a trolleybus in Bucharest. At one bus stop an old man gets off the bus, whilst a middle aged man replaces him, who then receptively calls his girlfriend or wife and threatens to kill her. When he leaves the bus, a young boy takes his seat...
The Passage is the story about three men who fled from Pinochet's coup in Chile in 1973 and ended up in Ceausescu's Romania. But, as for so many other Chileans, Romania was just a stop on the journey to the promised land of Sweden...
On October 3 Stefan Constantinescu will open an exhibition, The Golden Age, at Gal-On Art Place in Tel Aviv where he will show paintings, installations, and objects. The exhibition is on display till October 27.
The 20th anniversary of the fall of Ceausescu, former president and dictator of Romania, takes place on the 21st of December, 2009. The Berlin Wall had also fallen the same year, in 1989. For Romania and for many other countries, it has meant the beginning of a new political era. These two important political events are backdrops to the exhibition as well as to the book The Golden Age for Children. Through the book Stefan Constantinescu provides us with a genial pop-up construction with a rich flow of information. He is in fact telling us the story of the first part of his life: from birth till young age, while he has lived in Bucharest. The society where he was raised provided a complex political structure which was the only social reality of a growing boy like him.
In the exhibition The Golden Age you will find paintings, installations, objects, video works and his artist's book. His paintings are made in a social-realistic manner. The prototypes were the propaganda images of the communist era. His paintings add new dimensions that are lacking in the original photographs, as he includes the proof of affection to the vulnerable existence of human being. The exhibition might strike a chord in everyone. Most of us have grown up with just scattered memories of the conditions of our childhood. The project also sheds light upon the important issues of the present society which succeeded the old one. The Golden Age offers the opportunity of approaching and discussing interesting attitudes from an artistic view point.
The artist was born in 1968 in Bucharest. He is now living in Stockholm and Bucharest. Stefan Constantinescu is well known as a video artist in his home countries but he is actually working with many different media. He was trained in the Academy of Fine Arts in Bucharest and in the Royal Academy of Arts, Stockholm (MA).
The Event is organized by the Romanian Cultural Institute in Tel Aviv together with the Center for Contemporary Art (CCA) and Gal-On Art Place in Tel Aviv .
In November, after the show in Tel Aviv, the exhibition The Golden Age will travel to the Romanian Cultural Institute in London.
2009 is also the year of the releases of the artist's book The Golden Age for Children in Bucharest, Stockholm and New York, releases organized by the Romanian Cultural Institutes in the respective countries. The Book itself was produced by the Romanian Cultural Institute in Stockholm, whom we also thank for their support in organizing the event in Tel Aviv. The art work is purchased to the collection of the Moderna Museet in Stockholm.
Catrin Lundqvist is a curator working independently with her company Domestic Art and as a curator of learning at Moderna Museet, based in Stockholm.
30 September 8 pm: The film maker Ştefan Constantinescu CCA (The Center for Contemporary Art), 5 Kalisher St., Tel Aviv
www.cca.org.il
Entrance fee: NIS 10 Screening programme: Trolleybus 92, 8 min, 2009. The Passage, 62 min, 2005.
Participants: Ştefan Constantinescu and Catrin Lundqvist
3-27 October: The Golden Age Curator: Catrin Lundqvist
Gal-On Art Place, 79-81 Yehuda Halevi St., Tel Aviv
www.artplace.co.il
Opening: 3 October, 8 pm Gallery talk: 16 October, 12 am. With Israeli artist Yehudit Matzkel
"In 1968, the year of Ştefan Constantinescu's birth, revolts began in both East and West. In Romania, however, a deceptive calm prevailed, despite Nicolae Ceauşescu's sharp criticism of the Red Army's invasion of Czechoslovakia after the Prague Spring. […]1989, Romania's revolutionary year and the date of Ceausescu's fall, coincided with the twenty-first year of Stefan Constantinescu's life. […]
Ştefan Constantinescu belongs to a generation that has chosen to work with pictures from the mass media and public archives. In his narrative art, which is both descriptive and personal, he treats the wounds created by history in his native land. The artistic aesthetics is a mixture of documentary film dogmas and social-realist propagandistic expression, to which he adds his personal handwriting. The artist succeeds in finding a balance between opposing methods of creating historically interesting documents, with a personal nerve that makes his art authentically vibrant. He has chosen narrative in order to communicate his own stories, and in them no one will fail to notice the statement that human suffering and joy are linked to prevailing political circumstances."
Excerpt from Ştefan Constantinescu. A Child of the Revolution, text written by Catrin Lundqvist for the the artist's presence in the 53rd Venice Biennial.
More information on the artist and his work can be found at:
www.rkis.se/filiale/evenimente_a.php?cod=1439&cod_filiala=28
www.forma12.com
atelier.liternet.ro/articol/6972/Stefan-Constantinescu-Adina-Bradeanu-Agnes-Ers-Ana-Maria-Zahariade-Ion-Grigorescu/Epoca-de-Aur-pentru-copii.html
