Ars Telefonica :: until October 30, 2008 :: Centre for Visual Introspection, 16 Biserica Enei, Bucharest, District 1, Romania.

Scheduled to take place with regularity in Bucharest, involving with each edition new curatorial formats, Ars Telefonica is conceived as a temporary platform for exhibition display which proposes a re-reading of the connections settled in a specific context between art, its venue and audience. The decision of the curators to appropriate for this edition a temporary space for exhibition display – the phone booth – responds to the actual request of the local art scene to search for new contexts of dissemination of contemporary art and to establish a community of interest for this cultural sector.

The question dropped by the project is to which extend a temporary platform of this kind can disturb the behavior of the art public, the accidental public or of the partners participating directly to contemporary art production? Do these spaces have a potential in facilitating or in speeding up the process of social and cultural exchange?

Centre for Visual Introspection is an independent platform for research, artistic and theoretical production founded in Bucharest by a collective of artists and curators. The Centre opened its doors with a series of site-specific art interventions displayed in the phone booths in the central district of Bucharest between September 23 + 27, and an accompanying program of lectures, sound performances and a special exhibition, grouped under the title Ars Telefonica. The artists’ proposals involve means of expression belonging to connected cognitive fields, giving to the passers-by the possibility to choose new coordinates to orientate in the city. The relationship of the artistic projects with the community life, the cultural memory of a place and as well with another model of communication, provoked by the appropriation of an unconventional venue, settles a change in the public expectations as far as the way art is exhibited and comes into dialogue with the spectator.

Participants: Studio Basar (Bucharest); Luca Frei (Malmő); Carl Michael von Hausswolff (Stockholm); Dőrte Meyer (Berlin); Roland Schőny (Vienna); Bernhard Schreiner (Frankfurt); son:DA (Maribor); Jiri Skala (Prague); Nasan Tur (Berlin); Joanna Warsza (Warsaw); Adnan Yildiz (Istanbul/Berlin)

Special Event: Let me hold you hand by Iratxe Jaio + Klaas van Gorkum (Rotterdam); Opening October 2. Let me hold your hand consists of old telephones, salvaged from the obscurity of second-hand shops. Each with its own peculiar character, derived from the ever changing trends of commodity design, seems to represent a voice of a different epoch. If these objects could talk, what would they say?