Alina Popa with Florin Flueras

📍 Venue → GHMP

The collaborative and virtual collection of practices by Romanian artists Alina Popa and Florin Flueras occurs in the exhibition as conjoined suggestions, on one hand appearing as remnants of performative events and on the other as second bodies that exist parallel to their actual and individual works. Surrogate to each other’s activation or even documentation, the inextricable presence of Popa’s Heal the Line in Flueras’s Unexperiences situate the artists’ working definition of “artworks as artworlds,” a principle tested in “mildly choreographed processes established as artworks” in the scope of the project Artworlds.

In Heal the Line, a line is drawn on the floor to the measure of the artist’s height. Visitors can touch the line that will also heal it. Overlapping this post-therapeutic condition is Unexperiences, another process of Artworlds in the framework of Black Hyperbox. Unlike the coincidence between the line and another body in Popa’s work, bodies are present in Unexperiences as they are inserted like waves in “inappropriate” contexts where another system of attitudes and behaviors is already taking place. Both affect-oriented incidences transmit art-making and life-making in the most unreasonable, alienating gaps between concept and experience.

Alina Popa (February 1, 1982, Ploiești – February 1, 2019) was a Romanian artist who moved between choreography, theory, and contemporary art. She was a co-founder of the Bureau of Melodramatic Research (BMR) and co-initiator of the ArtLeaks platform. Her political and artistic research centered on affect theory, the relationship between neoliberalism and melodrama, and the ideological ties between mountaineering and nationalism. Popa studied finance at the Bucharest Academy of Economic Studies (2000–2004) before studying painting, cinematography, and photography at the Hungarian University of Fine Arts, Bucharest (2003–2009). At the BMR, which she founded together with Irina Gheorghe in 2009, she researched the ways in which emotion is gendered and feminized, created work that addresses the effects of capitalism in contemporary society, and formed an online platform that aims to amplify the voices of cultural workers whose labor rights have been violated. She showed and performed at various institutions, such as MUMOK in Vienna, DEPO in Istanbul, and Martin Gropius Bau in Berlin. She lived and worked in Bucharest.

Florin Flueras’s (*1978) work expands into spheres of politics, philosophy, spirituality, health care, media, education, and literature, producing performative meetings between art and its outside and affecting conventions and certainties in both areas. In Artwork he transforms works into practices, composing a “method” in the format of somatic/spiritual methods. With Alina Popa he created alternative art environments such as the series Artworlds (Unsorcery, Clinica, Black Hyperbox). With Ion Dumitrescu he initiated Postspectacle, a practice of applying performative tools outside art, like in the  presidential campaign of The Candidate. He has shown at Fap in São Paulo, DEPO in Istanbul, Ujazdowski Castle in Warsaw, Jardim Equatorial in São Paulo, Fabrica de Pensule in Cluj, MUMOK Kino in Vienna, HAU in Berlin, TQW in Vienna, Karas in Zagreb, DeSingle in Antwerp, Suprainfinit in Bucharest, Atelier 35 in Bucharest, MNAC in Bucharest, Salonul de Proiecte in Bucharest, Berardo Museum in Lisbon, Aleppo in Brussels, Akademie Solitude in Stuttgart, Europalia in Brussels, Bozar in Brussels, and Swimming Pool in Sofia.