Valentina Maria Iancu
Curator in Residence October 2023, Romania /
© Katja Lee Eliad
Valentina Iancu (b. 1985) is living and working in Romania. She currently is working as an unaffiliated writer and researcher, with a hybrid projectarian activity split between editorial, educational, curatorial and management work. With Art History and image theory studies background, her work focuses on solidarity narratives, surviving strategies and a healing poesis as seen in marginalized histories in both modern and contemporary art. She works informed by feminism, decolonial critique, queer theory, and critical race studies. Between 2008 and 2017 she worked as a curator at the National Museum of Art of Romania. Since 2010 she has been a constant collaborator of Arta Magazine.
STATEMENT
I will take the residency time and room of my own for continuing slowly writing a history of queer art in Romania.
Recent related research projects:
1. A curated number from Arta Magazine, dealing with the politics and poetics of scandals surrounding art objects - Scandalogy - Number 58-59/ 2022
2. Karol Radziszewski Queer Archive Institute in Romania exhibition at the National Museum of Contemporary Art:
Queer Archives Institute is an imaginary institution founded by Polish artist Karol Radziszewski in 2015, an approach that continues his artistic practice based on the research and archival of LGBT history, from a subjective and personal point of view. In 2015, after 10 years of research, the artist became an institution, the Queer Archives Institute. The Queer Archives Institute collection includes original or copies of documents that attest to the existence of LGBT culture in Central and Eastern Europe.
The MNAC Bucharest exhibition is organized by Valentina Iancu and Andreea Drăghicescu with the support of MozaiQ and marks the third project of Radziszewski in Romania. In 2007 Karol participated in a residency in Sibiu, coordinated by Anca Mihuleț. Following this project, the first international issue of DIK Fagazine was produced, a publication dedicated to masculinity in Romania, which was revisited during the exhibition in Bucharest through a revised re-issue of DIK Fagazine.
QAI / RO Publication here
3. Queer. Critical thinking, political consciousness and cultural practices in Romania, ed. Hecate 2020 edited together with Ovidiu Anemtoaicei. In Romanian language only
4. Katja Lee Eliad’s Map Maker Like Lyrical offers a retrospective view on the self-taught artist’s work over the past two decades. Her personal trajectory has been shaped by the experience of migration, queer identity, rich/complex family history, which also reflect in her artworks that arch across mediums, from drawing and painting to poetry, video and sound. Having to adapt to constantly shifting conditions, by often changing studios between France, Romania and the US, her artworks are diverse in terms of formal qualities and means of expression. The extensively illustrated book is accompanied by two essays by Valentina Iancu and Anca Verona Mihuleț and a conversation with the artist by Nicolas de Ribou, aiming to map the coordinates of a tortuous journey.
External Links
Instagram @valentinaiancu.airam
Queering the Culture