This will age really well | Co-curating the first NFT-centric exhibition in Romania
Posted by Raluca Turcanasu on / 0 Comments
After my extensive and critical contributions in Revista ARTA and Revista 22, Ioana Marșic, artist and curator, promoter and making-happen-er of all sorts, reached out to me.
Together with Leilei, Andrei, Andrei and Lucian, she was just starting to imagine a NFT-centric exhibition in Romania. But, besides playing around within this new crypto-realm, it was not clear exactly what and how. They needed a hand conceptualizing their thoughts – a curatorial direction of sorts – and with communicating it in an attractive manner (especially during summer, when people are away or hiding in the AC, galleries are less visited).
I thought that as NFTs have a constant becoming (still allowing myself to be informed by Deleuze) with their constant value change potential, similarly our exhibition should have a becoming, an evolution.
What triggers the possibilities of degradability & endurance?
Time, of course.
That same flow of time that degrades a material work (or a face) beyond recognition will enrich a digital work (or a wine). The same time will carry bodily matter through successive transformations to eventual extinction while strengthening disembodied materialities (like a tweet that aged well) or simply allowing them to remain unaltered in some forsaken corner of the Internet.
The works will question these cascading dualities (in cascading rollbacks and cascading style sheets): time as a fragilizing and strengthening force, performative becomings (of a static work, like a canvas) and cemented existences (of a dynamic multimedia work such as a video) in the context of the constant ebb & flow e-capital art markets.
So, we agreed to have the exhibition in 4 chapters – more reason to have openings, more reason to communicate 🤓
I played with words – tenses and words from the NFT world, resulting in these mini-curatorial concepts:
Chapter 1: This will age really well – Mint me up
Chapter 2: This is aging really well – The stakes are high with this one
Chapter 3: This aged really well – Forge those sidechains
For this chapter I also forged myself in the exhibition, because I really felt it’s important to embed some auto-critical thinking in the entire “product’. Therefore, I devised a dizzy-ish video essay – informed by Hito Steyerl’s “poor image” – that balances the digital discourse, and the appreciation of these novel technologies, with being present and contemplative in the forest.
It was projected inside the gallery.
Ra’s counter concept: NFTs vs nature. A smarty pants rant.
The NFTs associated to the material works were collectible in a Tezos-based wallet, such as Kukai.
Exhibiting artists: Laurian Bardoș, George Crîngașu, Lucian Hrisav, Iioana, Bernard Joisten, Albert Kaan, Nicoleta Mureș, Marina Oprea, Lost.Optics, Dan Perjovschi, ZafGod
Romanita Oprea from the Business-Review.eu picked my mind about it, here.
Curatorial team: Ioana Marșic, Lucian Hrisav, Andrei Zaharia (ZafGod) and myself.
Together with the extended team at Leilei Gallery, 2012.
Graphic design & photography: Andrei Mateescu
