Anca Benera and Arnold Estefan 
performance Pacta sunt Servanda,  chapter 4 - Fekete Március / Martie negru / Black March 
duration: 15 min.
April 19th  at 19:00 and April 21st at 16:00 at Palais de Tokyo - 13 Avenue du Président Wilson

20 April - 26 August, Palais de Tokyo, Paris
 Artistic Director: Okwui Enwezor
Associate Curators: Mélanie Bouteloup, Adbellah Karoum, Émilie Renard, Claire Staebler

"Inspired by the great work of early to mid 20th century French ethnography figures such as Claude Levi-Strauss, Marcel Mauss, Michel Leiris, and Marcel Griaule, La Triennale sets off on a journey to explore the nodes where art and ethnography converge in a renewal of fascination and estrangement. Fundamentally, the goal of the project is to shift from the idea of national space, as a constituted physical location, to a frontier space that constantly assumes new morphologies and new models of categorization (local, national, trans-national, geo-political, denational, pure, contaminated, etc.)
Contemporary art has become a global phenomenon fostered by an ever growing network of relations overcoming distances. La Triennale will therefore approach the art of today through this wealth of connections. Its title Intense Proximity points to those frictions, those heterogeneous tensions which set every human activity into motion. It also questions how an individual’s origins, intellectual education or life path have an impact on his/her situation in the larger context of a society in which the fault lines are increasingly uncharted..." [more]



http://www.latriennale.org/en/artists/anca-benera-arnold-estefan

http://www.latriennale.org/en/artists/centre-visual-introspection

http://spalatorie.md

exhibition opening on Wednesday 30 nov 7 - 9 pm 
Camden Arts Centre, Arkwright Road NW3 6DG, London

"Romanian artist Anca Benera works in a range of media spanning video, performance and sculpture. Her practice focuses on storytelling and re-construction; in particular she is interested in investigating how stories are told and the methods through which we arrive at collectively accepted truths. Benera uses the public realm as both a resource and a medium to present and inform her projects, exploiting the layered multiplicity of histories which make up the urban environment to re-examine and challenge our perceptions of the world around us. During her residency Benera will develop work as part of an ongoing research project, questioning these historical, social and political narratives." 

4th edition, 11-20 November, Temps d'Images festival, Cluj
Doppelgänger of the recent past
Curator: Raluca Voinea
Artists: Anca Benera&Arnold Estefan, Alexandra Pirici


The exhibition brings together video documentations of performances by artists Anca Benera and Arnold Estefan, on the one hand, and Alexandra Pirici together with a group of performers, on the other. Both works have been produced in 2011 and stage moments of encounter between the artists and Romania's history. In Pacta Sunt Servanda, Anca Benera and Arnold Estefan read simultaneously, in Romanian and Hungarian, one in front of each other, from their respective history schoolbooks, passages treating the same moments, but offering contradictory perspectives. Dacă voi nu ne vreţi, noi vă vrem [If you don't want us, we want you], the work of Alexandra Pirici represents different enactments of living sculptures, confronting public heroic monuments and buildings in Bucharest, such as the controversially rebuilt equestrian statue of Carol I, the monument of the 1989 Revolution or the House of the People.

The artists embody the awkward reflexion of a past that is all too questionable despite its apparent immutability, with well-rooted and imposing effects on the present. In the uneven relationship between their voices or bodies and the written word, the stone or the bronze, they manage to cast doubt upon their objects of reference, to reveal them as the real ghosts.

Raluca Voinea

Self Publishing in Times of Freedom and Repression publication is included in the project Inventory by Archive Kabinett Berlin within the frame of 3 Thessaloniki Biennale.

Inventory is a representation of a research journey in the form of an archive of publications and printed matter. Starting from a central position in Europe (Berlin), the trip develops toward Eastern and Middle Eastern regions through cities like Poznan, Prague, Budapest, Belgrade, Bucharest, Sofia and Istanbul, ultimately reaching Thessaloniki.
In this journey we took into consideration the changes and movements currently taking place in Arabic countries and Greek regions, and saw their impact on cultural, economical, political and social structures as a possibility to question European cultural establishments and their “patriarchal” archives. The project tried to dig deep into the recent past of these regions and into their heritage, in order to record an inventory of anomalies, heresies, anarchism and feminism.
http://www.archivekabinett.org/

 Catedra de Istorie Temporara / Temporary History Deparment. 
exhibition catalogue

 

Centre for Visual Introspection,  Biserica Enei 16, Bucharest. www.pplus4.ro 
 

 3 ANI FARA ARTA / 3 YEARS WITHOUT ART (after Gustav Metzger)

performance (with Alina Serban), Where Art does take place in the End Times? 
Caminul Cultural, Bucharest, 2011  

 Author: Anca Benera
Editorial concept: Anca Benera & Alina Serban
Language: Romanian/ English
Number of pages: 318
Published by: Romanian Cultural Institute Texts by: Ioana Beldiman, Ellen Blumenstein, 
Reuben Fowkes,Duncan Light, Ciprian Mihali, Deborah Schultz, Alina Serban, Ioana Vlasiu
Sound editor: Catalin Rulea
Design: Arnold Estefan
ISBN 978-973-577-621-3
Year: 2011  

http://www.pplus4.ro/publications.html

 WORKSHOP & PUBLIC LECTURES
19-23 April, 2011
Centre for Visual Introspection, Bucharest
Self-publishing in Romania has a complex and still insufficiently researched and publicized 
history. Publishing as a means of self-expression and samizdat as a form of it, born in specific 
oppressive conditions, might shed a new light on the meaning of self-publishing, its forms and 
challenges today. What are the new forms of censorship today? What are the limits and means of 
self-expression / self-censorship and freedom of speech? What is the role of printed matter in 
the age of internet and social networks? 

 Concept and organization: Anca Benera, Arnold Estefan
Workshop imparted by Marco Balesteros & Sofia Goncalves (Portugal) 
Participants: Renata Catambas (Portugal/NL), Rafaela Drazic (Croatia) Elenora Farina (Italy),
Ward Heirwegh (Belgium), Tzortzis Rallis(Greece/UK), Katarina Sevic (Serbia/Hungary), 
Golie Talaie (Iran/NL), Paul Wiersbinski(Germany) 
Lecturers: Lia Perjovschi (Romania), Piotr Rypson (Poland), Vasile Ernu(Romania), 
Olga Zaslavskaya (Rusia/Hungary)       

 Straying away from the well-known, sometimes formalized, aestheticized and
institutionalized path of the exhibition, Centre for Visual Introspection
introduces a new series of events entitled Making of (work).
The project focuses on documenting the intermediate stages, the sources and methods
that are part of the creation of a project. Thus, it reveals the process of research,
the context, ideas and attitudes of those invited, striving not to create an object
for an exhibition, but to activate a type of practice with possible effects on the
real lives of the participants. In this context,the project mentains the necessity
of redefining the position of both the artist and the viewer, and also the experience
of art. Find out more information on www.pplus4.ro 

"HEATED MINDS" ARCHIVE 13-15 JUNE 1990 
18 March - 11 April, 2011
Centre for Visual Introspection, Bucharest
 curators: Mihaela Michailov, David Schwartz

 CNDB, CARE-I TREABA?/CNDB,WHAT’S THE MATTER? 
curator: Manuel Pelmus
10 March - 15 March, 2011 

X-RAYING THE LANDSCAPE OF OUR SUBZISTENCE: THE CENTER FOR VISUAL INTROSPECTION
An Interview with Anca Benera, Arnold Estefan, Catalin Rulea and Alina Serban 
by Daria Ghiu.
www.idea.ro/revista
www.pplus4.ro