Vlad Morariu
artist in residence November - December 2012, Rumania /
Artist's statement
"I consider my residence in Vienna as an opportunity to complete my ongoing research on institutional critique, which I currently pursue within a PhD program in the UK. In Vienna I have two main objectives. First of all, this city represents for me the place which hosts one of the most powerful Occupy Universities movement, where students at the Art Academy have often taken leadership. Since it is my belief that in order to reinvent itself, institutional critique as a practise has to rewrite its vocabulary and engage in transversal alliances with similar movements from neighbouring fields (from the greater struggles against the privatization of universities and national health systems to micro-political struggles in immigrant ghettos), my aim is to contact and discuss with representatives of these movements. Secondly, my research approach has been greatly influenced by the online journal transversal and its published dossiers. This is a project of the European Institute for Progressive Cultural Policies, and my intention is to meet and interview the people who have been associated with this platform."
Biography
"I am currently a PhD. research student at Loughborough University School of the Arts, where I occasionally take teaching duties. Here I thought seminars on New Genre Public Art and The Concept of Precarity in the field of Culture. I was Marius Babias' assistant curator for Periferic 7 Biennial for Contemporary Art / Social Processes Section (Iasi/Romania 2005-2006) and also for L'Europe en devenir. Partie II (Swiss Cultural Institute, Paris, 2007). I curated Beneath the Remains: Translations of Estrangement and the Politics of Survival (arttransponder, Berlin, 2009). Between 2004-2008 I was part of the organisational team of the Periferic Biennial for Contemporary Art. I currently activate as curator within vessel / Bari, Italy, in the frame of which I recently co-curated the “GS1. Enter the Artworld? Marginal establishments, cooptation and resistance” (Bari, june 12-14, 2012) international conference. I also activate in ArtLeaks, where I am involved in the publishing of cases of censorship and exploitation in the arts and in the organisation of working assemblies. I translated from English to Romanian Arthur Danto's Transfiguration of the Commonplace. A philosophy of art (Transfigurarea locului comun. O filosofie a artei, Idea: Cluj, 2012) and from German to Romanian Marius Babias' Die Rückeroberung der Politik (Recucerirea Politicului, Cluj: Idea, 2008, in collaboration with Cristian Cercel)."