Experimented in Romania

Ion Bârlădeanu is already an iconic figure, known worldwide as a homeless art-world darling starring in Alexander Nanău’s documentary, The World According to Ion B. Carmen Lidia Vidu portrays him as a unique soul who ingenuously asserts his obsessions and favourite things found in Bucharest. Through editing she captures fragments of his digressive desires and memories, emphasizing his mercurial personality joined by a significant number of real and fictional figures which exist in his famous collages. She reaches his iconography following his artistic direction swamped in irony and social critique. The collages he puts together are his own films but Carmen succeeds to create a moving collage placing him in the center of his own picture.” (Claudia Cojocariu, BIEFF)

Veda Popovici depicts through this video performance a series of tableaux vivants inspired by art poses of Renaissance paintings, Orientalism or sculptures (such as Venus de Milo), providing an intensive discourse about art history retold through the black square created by Kazimir Malevich one hundred years ago. The artist smashes this sign of erudition and class distinction with an enchanted story that guides its audience to reflect moments in the art history and its political contexts. Her delicate movements and discerning eyes, disguised and cloacked with the same black square brings attention to the patriarchal structures which dominated our world, highlighting a feminist discourse which invites you to choose your own revolutionary gear: to participate or to watch. (Claudia Cojocariu, BIEFF)

No Shelter from the Storm is a video-installation set in woodland that has been devastated by deforestation and therefore offers no place to hide for those escaping any kind of conflict. Besides its ecological viewpoint which talks in terms of mass destruction by multinational corporations, the video echoes about human condition and loneliness in a homeland that struggles to maintain its habitat. An optimistic note is provided by the intermingled whistling seen as a solitary struggle, in the hope of collective solidarity. Shot in black and white, the textural images offer a timelessness feeling of insecurity, while camera movements depict a paradox between the absence of the forest and its beauty. (Claudia Cojocariu, BIEFF)

Dragoș Alexandrescu is willing to show us how the simulative nature of our existence, of the inherent constraints of the system affect us in our daily life and in our personal development. The biggest three doctrines exposed with their specific books: marxism, religion and capitalism are buried under the failure of the entire society; they’re being deconstructed through a meticulous work process of tearing out and aligning paper fragments in a highly organized labor which gives us the successful ideological image, that of binding together people. However, the counterpoint is the girl who sits and knits and rejects the nostalgia of simpler times, emphasizing the fact that having flaws still let you succeed in your creation and in what must be reconstructed. (Claudia Cojocariu, BIEFF)

An intimate self-reflective journey, At the Mirror signed by Larisa Crunțeanu, seductively portrays the rite of passage into adulthood. A girl – performed by the artist – watches herself (us) into the mirror (camera lens). While she combs her hair, she whispers absent-mindedly a (self-referential) song about a girl (in front of a mirror) who discovers herself in her budding womanhood. Gracefully capturing the tension between innocence and sensuality, the performative body radiates the excitement and anxiety, the confusion and rebellion, the longing and solitude of becoming a woman. Beyond this, At the Mirror works further on a meta-level, as its every new screening is a recording of the previous projection. As the artist notes: This is a work which disappears with every projection. Just like memories, in the end the image disappears, leaving behind a fiction resembling the original story. Impressive in its simplicity, conceptual rigor and depth, At the Mirror becomes a sensorial discourse on time, on memory's frailty and the inevitability of change. (Adina Pintilie, BIEFF)

Cleverly playing with the tension between the visual and audio discourse, Cobalt Blue by Diana Miron delivers a captivating reflection on the connection between aesthetics and the body. Starting from the root of the word aesthetics as an experience of the senses, the voiceover muses on various philosophical views on the topic, while the artist’s performative body undergoes an inner transformation which ironically addresses the viewer's scopophilia. Intelligent, ludic and sensual at the same time, Cobalt Blue will stay imprinted in our sensorial memory, existing in that elusive area where the artist, the work and the audience meet and change one another. As the film says, we are fundamentally aesthetic beings, we are embodied beings, we are beings that exist in this way - we sense, we care about these senses, we are transformed by them and our actions and view of the world are shaped by that. (Adina Pintilie, BIEFF)