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tranzit.org/

Timofte Andrei & Ovidiu Pop

artist in residence October 2017, Romania /



Statement

During the MQAir residency we intend to conduct a structural research of the markets in Vienna. We want to explore the unequivocal relationship between the local market and merchandise, in the context of global consumption. The modularity of the markets allows us to study the premises traced back to the recent economic crises and geopolitical instability. We believe in the need of understanding the commodification mechanisms in which the social and economic relationships work.
Our video work, We disobey! Freedom of the market place, deals with the production of the locality in the context of globalized economy. We focus on the market place as a locus where the contradictions of current asymmetric production relations are strikingly expressed.
During our stay, we will work on the production of a video footage centered around central and peripheral market places in the city, such as Naschmarkt and Viktor Adler Markt. Together we will film and discuss, visit and re-visit these urban complexes in order to reveal a more structural story of the sites, a hidden view to the local eye. Rather than creating a narrative or documentary story of the sites, our common purpose is to localize the relation between liberty and constraint emphasizing the difference between local centers and global peripheries. The visual intention is to display frames that connect local people both with the commodities and with the architectural elements – starting from the technical manner of capturing through motion. The purpose of discussing the material is to insert, in a second phase of the project, short notes or poetical sketches to accompany the images and unveil the location of the beholder.
The title of the work points directly to the thin line between freedom and constraint in the global/imperial matrix of production. Which commodities are exchanged, where, and how are they changing the urbanscape? Is globalization homogenizing spaces, people, consumption cultures, or are there variations in this process, which reshape old divides and hierarchies? And not least: what is the place of resistance in all this?

Biography

Andrei Timofte (b. 1988) lives and works as an artist and freelance designer in Iasi, Romania. Currently, he’s a Phd. candidate at the “Faculty of Fine Arts and Design”, the National University of Arts “George Enescu”, Iasi. He’s a practice combines dreams, past ‘marking’ experiences and futuristic fantasies in order to translate into a hybrid representation of multiple reality negotiated through emphatic acceptance. Experimenting with various mediums he’s curious about the way cultural production and local politics could merge in order to influence the public sphere or isolated rural places, which are often, visited and re-visited during more years. He’s interested in the way environmental graphic designs and cultural branding affects daily life and can be used as a constructive practice.

Since 2010 he has been an active member of the SATellite group (Social Artistic Tendency) together with Delia Bulgaru and Alex Tărnăuceanu. The artistic practice developed by the members of this group has social applicability and aims to research the local or extended socio-political context. The artworks are focused on contemporary issues therefore the projects become a chronicle in images of the significant local events. Their collaborative involvement relies more on producing team projects rather than creating individual or independent works.


Ovid Pop’s (b. 1982) main field of interest is literature and critical/decolonial theory, to which he has dedicated most of his efforts since having completed his degree in the Department of Political Science at the University of Vienna in 2009. His experience spans several years and involves different academic and literary institutions in Cluj, Bucharest and Vienna. He has held courses on contemporary art in Eastern Europe, modernity and the emergence of the subaltern subjectivity in Eastern Europe at the University of Arts in Bucharest, SNSPA (Bucharest) and at the University of Vienna.
At the moment Ovid Pop conducts (together with Radostina Patulova) the activities of the Das Literarische Kollektiv in der Gastsprache in Wien, a transnational literary circle of first-generation migrant writers writing in German as a foreign language.
Pop regards himself as a transnational migrant, and divides his life between the country of his origin (Romania) and his adopted country (Austria). In both places he nurtures long-standing and ongoing relationships with artistic and political groups, each of which has shaped his convictions and prompted him to consider topics such as the colonial nature of power and aesthetics, poverty, housing rights, precarity, migration, etc. He places his work at cross-borders, in the borderlands, as the Chicana writer Gloria E. Anzaldúa phrased it.
While living and studying in Vienna, he was confronted with the East/West divide within the European Union, so he perceives his use of knowledge and his literary production as operating in a concrete field of power and marked by a kind of urgency.
Recently, he was awarded the Exilliteratur Prize in Vienna.

Downloads
portfolio_Andrei_Timofte_201.pdf (pdf, 822 kb)