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Cristian Nae

curator in residence May 2014, Romania /



Statement

"My current research projects include the comparative analysis of post-socialism and post-colonialism, as well as the conjunction of large scale exhibitions in reconstructing global imaginaries and, in a broader sense, in promoting a revisionist art historical discourse. During my residency in Vienna, I intend to focus on the tension between the narrative and documentary dimension of photographic and video art practices in relation to space and architecture in Central Europe since 1989. I am interested in disclosing the way self-reflective practices of artistic installation heighten the artists’s awareness of the context of exhibition. I am also interested in examining the critical function of utopia in the discourse of several contemporary artists, especially when it is used as a cultural background against which different forms of present-day heterochronias may be compared and understood. More precisely, I intend to focus on the methodologies of artistic research used by several key artists dealing with different meanings of modernity and different strategies of remembrance, actualization and materialization of the past such as Andreas Fogarasi, Dominik Lang, Ilona Nemeth, Tobias Putrih and Thomas Svoboda, living and working around Vienna. Hopefully, this residence will allow me to conduct interviews with some of these artists. Another significant part of my theoretical research will also involve the archives of institutions such as MUMOK, the Kontakt Collection of Erste Bank and Generali Foundation, where I am interested not only in examining the formation of a certain institutional discourse, but also in preparing a future exhibition project on the topic of narrating, rewriting and re-imagining the past in different socio-political and cultural contexts."

Biography

Cristian Nae is Ph.D. Associate Professor of Art Theory at George Enescu University of Arts, Iasi. He is currently member of the editorial board of Artmargins journal and writes art criticism on a regular basis for different contemporary art magazines such as IDEA, ARTA etc. He has been a NEC and Getty-NEC fellow of the Institute for Advanced Studies in Bucharest and has conducted a Patterns_Lectures grant on the topic of Politics of Identity in Eastern European Art since 1989 awarded by Erste Stiftung and WUS Austria for developing a new course at the University of Arts in Iasi. He is also a member of different professional associations such as College Arts Association in the USA and AICA. His most recent texts have been included in publications such as "Curating Eastern Europe and Beyond: Art Histories through the Exhibition” (ed. Maria Oriskova, Veda & Peter Lang Publishing, 2014).