Seminar of Accidental Wisdom #8: Cristina Vasilescu: The contingency of spaces and practices in curating – drawing from SUPRAINFINIT gallery and Quote—Unquote platform (Bucharest)
15. 12. 2021, 19.00 | Online
Zoom Stream https://bit.ly/3ETeJ82
Facebook Live https://fb.me/e/1CrdM2suq
On Wednesday, December 15, 2021, the curator Cristina Vasilescu will be the guest speaker for the 8th edition of the Seminar of Accidental Wisdom lecture series. The event will take place from 19.00 via online streams on Zoom and Facebook Live.
This talk is introducing the curatorial practice of Cristina Vasilescu unfolding in a multitude of spaces and engaging diverse artistic practices, both local and international within the ever-changing idiosyncratic context of Bucharest. Operating with contingency and a multilayered approach inside a commercial gallery, as well as expanding its program with discursive projects, these will be further visualized through specific exhibitions, such as The Conch Shell (2021), Storage Moods (2020), Kristin Wenzel: Atentie, cad ornamente (2019) and the two project spaces set within the gallery framework: SEQUENCE —a vitrine space visible 24/7, dedicated to site-specific installations & SALTMINE —a failed urban salt room transformed into a hybrid art space. The second part of the talk will be dedicated to the methodology of Quote—Unquote platform to follow and provoke the juxtaposition of various art practices in order to create new productions and the understanding of the event as a process of transformation and co-creation with other professions beyond the art world.
Cristina Vasilescu (b. 1992), curator based in Bucharest and Berlin, is the Artistic Director of SUPRAINFINIT Gallery (since 2018) where, amongst others, she collaborated with artists such as Apparatus 22, Peles Empire, Candice Lin, Ana Lupas, Jala Wahid, Christian Jankowski, Jimmy Robert, Eloise Bonneviot, Florin Flueras.
Since 2019 she is co-founder and co-curator of QUOTE—UNQUOTE (together w Irina Radu & Dan Angelescu), an interdisciplinary platform that investigates the mechanisms, uses, and effects of (public) speech in contemporary society through artistic practice and its intersection with other domains of activity. In 2022, she will be curating “Heartbeat Detection Systems”—the first retrospective exhibition of The Bureau of Melodramatic Research, a dependent institution founded by Irina Gheorghe and Alina Popa in 2009 to investigate the role of emotions in contemporary politics and the new economy— at both SUPRAINFINIT Gallery and Goethe-Institut, Bucharest. Between 2017 and 2018 she co-ran CLEARVIEW, a contemporary art project, a residency program, a series of events, and a collective dedicated to the vision of the invited practitioners, with its base in North London. She contributed to Temporary Art Review, ARTA Magazine, Zepellin Magazine, and Baltic Triennial 13 catalog. She holds an MA in Curating Contemporary Art from the Royal College of Art, London (2017) and a BA in Social and Cultural Studies from Goldsmiths College, University of London (2014).
Seminar of Accidental Wisdom (SAW) is an interdisciplinary series of lectures by curators, artists, and theoreticians who will enter a dialogue with viewers about the theoretical interpretation of contemporary audiovisual forms, photography, and exhibition theory. SAW is a joint project of the Film and TV School of the Academy of Performing Arts in Prague and Kunsthalle Bratislava. The Seminar of Accidental Wisdom has been kindly supported by the Ministry of Culture Czech Republic Arts Grant.
Image: The Conch Shell, exhibition view, SUPRAINFINIT GALLERY, 2021 (c) Cristina Vasilescu