Urban Transitions

Exhibition – Contemporary Photography

Former Espace Apollonia – November 2010

Andrei MATEESCU Multirateral. Untitled 2, 2010

Artists: Alexandra Croitoru, Iosif Kiraly, Andrei Mateescu, Studio Bazar (Alex Axinte & Cristi Borcan)


Curator: Irina Cios


Structured into two parts, this project invites the public to discover eight Romanian artists working in photography. While photography was fully recognized as an artistic medium in the nineties, it mainly established itself in Romania as one of the most active fields for artistic creation. Through different personalities and points of view, the selection of artists presented in Strasbourg offers a glimpse of the actual trends present in the Romanian contemporary art culture. Most of these artists have complex works, based mainly in photography, but these works also include, drawings, objects, performances, architectural forms, or public participation.

The exhibition, which will be held at Apollonia starting Friday November 5th, 2010, will present different works about the transience of human presence in contemporary urban landscape. The work of Alexandra Croitoru presents the accumulation of printed matter from cultural production. This project reappraises the text, the media, and the society of consumption. Pictures and concepts are melted and then reshaped into new forms. Iosif Kiraly explores the link between different layers of the city during the transition from communism to liberalism. Through a number of shots taken over a day and then superimposed, the evolution of urban development emerges from different phenomenons: urban development is revealed through the phenomena of demolition, reconstruction, evolution of facades and neighborhoors. Through photographic retouching, Andrei Mateescu suggests taking possesstion of the utopian communist architectural hertiage, a heritage which highlights the alienating aspects of collective housing structures. The two architects from Studiobasar (Alex Axinte & Cristi Borcan), work on interdisciplinary projects. Their work deals with the paradoxical  nature of the restoration process and their analyzation of hybrid residential structures forced by the evacuation of the tenant’s nationalized building.