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Iulia Toma & Claudiu Cobilanschi

artist in residence February 2016, Romania /



Statement

The principal inspiration behind this residency research is the availability of two different collections - of natural science and of contemporary art respectively, that don't have a real counterpart in Bucharest: MAK – Austrian Museum of Applied Arts and the world-renowned meteorite collection at the Natural History Museum Vienna.

Iulia Toma is teaching a course in UNARTE Bucharest, Dept. Textile ART with the title “From subject to object in contemporary textile art” and wants to continue her research with an extensive study of the MAK collections, as a necessary addition to a future publication based on her doctoral thesis.

Claudiu Cobilanschi was the artist in residence at the Kunsthalle Krems (Nov – Dec 2014). This enabled a first contact to the Natural History Museum in Vienna, enabling him the potential to develop a direct collaboration with researchers and scientists working for the NHM in Vienna, that would support a future documentary film based on meteorites found in Romania.

Biography

Iulia Gabriela Toma (b. 1974) is a mixed-media artist who works with the means of aesthetic expression through textile, as well as with photography, painting, installation and text in each work. Recently she has been focusing on social issues that she expresses in her own individual way: feminism, women's rights, interpersonal relations of closed communities, the materiality of urban living, social justice, etc.. Toma builds a personal discourse that is expressively and aesthetically organised in visual and activist orientations, each time trying to place the balance between message and material at an ever increasingly elaborate level. She teaches in the Department of Art & Design, Textile section at the National University of Arts Bucharest, practicing pedagogy in harmony with her personal activity as well as with the innovation required for didactic activity within the artistic discipline. Among her recent exhibitions are: 1st Timisoara Art Encounters APPEARANCE & ESSENCE, 2015 Mapping Bucharest: Art, Memory, and Revolution 1916-2016, group show part of Vienna Biennale 2015, MAK Vienna, Twilled Connections, group show, tranzit.ro, Bucharest, Kinder. Küche. Kirche, solo show, Calina Gallery, Timisoara and Untitled Fighter, solo show, 2014, Ivan Gallery, Bucharest. Represented by Ivan Gallery, Bucharest.

Claudiu Cobilanschi lives at the blurry boundary between art and media, using, as journalist, multiple mediums for different kinds of expression and, as an artist, the benefit of these media's mutual conflict. In his practice, he is approaching issues of stereotypical thinking, forecasting and physicality, etc. projecting messages in different mediums: photography & performance, super8 cinema, studies of expressiveness in conventional images, video-documents of immigrants, DIY saunas, interactive movies, etc. He has worked within the framework, and tested the limits of institutions such as ParadisGaraj & Die Kunsthalle Bukarest, Platforma & Salonul de Proiecte Anexa MNAC, Barbara Seiler Gallery, Kunsthalle Winterthur, Depo Instanbul, Rotwand Gallery, Museum Quartier, IGBildendeKunst Vienna, Nida ArtColony Lithuania, HBK Saar, Romanian Cultural Institute, MotorenHalle Dresden, Kunsthalle Krems, etc.