ART FRIDAYS
The “Contemporary Romanian Art Scene in 8 Gallery Tours” series, which for months has presented some of Romania’s best exhibition spaces, curators and artists, is now running as part of “Art Fridays”, our visual arts program meant to broaden the scope of your journey by illuminating all corners of Romanian visual creativity and inviting you to engage, no matter where you are. Continue the exploration of the most influential Romanian galleries, enjoy the hottest exhibitions all over the country, learn about recent works by first-rate artists and let yourselves be guided and transformed by the works artists create in response to the world we live in.
MATCA ART SPACE
We conclude the 2020 leg of our gallery tours with MATCA, an artist-run space managed by three local artists, set up in Cluj-Napoca at the beginning of 2017. A former garage and leather crafts workshop, the place projects a non-disguised atmosphere and a rough vibe, which invite artists and thinkers to engage in fertile, frank exchanges.
Focused mainly on group exhibitions, MATCA ("matrix" in translation) aims to promote contemporary works, to research the local artistic environment, and to facilitate the dialogue on the sources of visual creativity. In order to step more off the walls, the gallery advocates alternative forms of expression, which mix mediums related to traditional approaches as well as new, original practices. Its projects attempt a fusion between "the established" and "the emergent" as part of a non-hierarchical, ongoing conversation by which the artist’s status and role in the society can be debated.
#Episode 6: MATCA art space
Exhibitions presented:
>>Letting the days go by, water flowing underground by Iosif Király @ Matca arts pace, Cluj-Napoca October 23 – November 22, 2020 Curator: Cristina Stoenescu
In October-November 2020, the travelling exhibition "Letting the days go by, water flowing underground" by artist Iosif Király found its way to the independent art space Matca in Cluj-Napoca. Its first iteration, in Bucharest, had taken place under the uncertain conditions of the first lockdown; the end-of-March gallery show at Anca Poterasu had slowly transformed into the mid-June gallery reopening. In October, we found ourselves again under the strain of instability as more and more art spaces, cinemas, theaters closed down and reopened at random, impossible intervals – a series of decisions made and revoked towards the invisible threat of Covid-19. Perhaps it was (and still is) the right time to be thinking more about time, its irreversibility, its stubbornness to pass slowly when we want it to run faster, its obliviousness and indifference to our wishes.
Iosif Király delves head-on into different layers of time, as caught on camera, either in fragmented narrations over the years or in loops of video which he exhibits for the first time. At Matca artspace, the show focused on crossroad moments, framing them in a larger perspective. Crisis periods come and go, but also leave a mark that can resurface years, even generations later – memories forgotten and remembered, tied in together and continuously re-arranged.
>>Yet means at this time, or up to now, or at a future time
Featuring Adriana Gheorghe / Andreea Anghel / Vlad Brăteanu / Sebastian Big / Giulia Crețulescu / Anna Khodorkovskaya / Bogdan Vlăduță / Raluca Popa / Cătălin Burcea / Simina Oprescu & Andreea Vlăduț / Csilla Bartus / Museum of intimacy / Angela Capotorto / Matei Toșa
September 22 - October 19, 2020
@ Matca arts pace, Cluj-Napoca
Curator: Alexandra Mocan
Matca art space founders: Alexandru Muraru, Matei Toșa, Alexandra Mocan
Find out more about MATCA ART SPACE:
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/matcaartspace