Conference Outline

Curated by Marius Babias and Sabine Hentzsch, Spaţiul Public Bucureşti | Public Art Bucharest 2007 is a pilot project that creates throughout 2007 a trans-disciplinary discourse on art, architecture, urbanism, youth culture and education, in society and the public sphere. The project is aiming at confronting the audience with social developments, initiating public debates and emphasising the cultural contribution to the development of democracy. The following artists are part of the first stage of the project: Mircea Cantor, Anetta Mona Chişa / Lucia Tkáčová, Nicoleta Esinencu, H.arta, Daniel Knorr, Dan Perjovschi, and Lia Perjovschi.

Spaţiul Public Bucureşti | Public Art Bucharest 2007 opens on the 20th of April 2007 with an international conference which brings together theoreticians and practitioners of art in public space, representatives of institutions which are supporting public art initiatives, as well as key figures of the cultural and public life of Bucharest. The conference will contextualize and exemplify the discourse on the public sphere and the way this is reflecting the state of the city and of society in general. The notion of “public space” and its role in Western democracies has been essential for the theory of society since the 1960s, being defined as a forum for the staging of conflicts in society. Today, in the process of globalization and of aggressive capitalist society reducing the role of art to adornment, public art is proposed as a model of critical engagement with political and social issues.

The non-existence of a free public sphere in Romania during communism created not only a vacuum of understanding on this subject, but also the place for the post-communist untamed capitalism to acquire a monopoly on the public space. From an object of ideology and an instrument in the service of political power, to the object of entertainment, there seems to be little space left, in such a context, for public art to exercise a critical discourse. The participants at the Spaţiul Public Bucureşti | Public Art Bucharest 2007 conference will address these issues and propose models for or solutions to the activation of a democratic public sphere through public art and cultural production.

The conference has two parts: during the first part theoretician and curator Marius Babias will introduce the project and the conference topics and the artist Olaf Metzel will present a selection of his public art projects realized in the last 20 years. Also, Timotei Nădăşan will present the artists’ books series COLECŢIA PUBLIC, initiated within the project Spaţiul Public Bucureşti | Public Art Bucharest 2007. During the second part of the conference, Sabine Hentzsch, director of the Goethe-Institut Bukarest, will moderate a round table for which the participants are: Marlis Drevermann, director of the cultural affairs department of the city of Wuppertal, Horia-Roman Patapievici, president of Institutul Cultural Român, Şerban Sturdza, president of the Order of Architects in Romania, Michael M. Thoss, director of Allianz Kulturstiftung and Adriean Videanu, mayor of Bucharest.