Tree @ the Blind Museum

The Blind Museum presents: The Tree Under Which I Grew.

part of MMCP: More Than Perfect/Perfect Continous
18-30 September 2012
Platforma Space

Within the framework pf the Blind Museum, a careful research was initiated to find out the inner genealogy of the Department of Painting of the National University of Arts in Bucharest. For this, we have chosen all the professors that have been educated at this department and/or have educated future professors. Thus, the selection purposefully leaves out the persons that have not been educated at the Painting Department and who have not had students that became professors at the same department. However, even with this omission, the people selected form the majority of the professors that have taught at this department.
...
Indispensable to the representation of the nation-state, the Academy of Fine Arts in Bucharest, the today National University of Arts, has from its inception considered the painting department its cornerstone.
In this disciplinary model the central figure is the Master or the Professor. His function is a key position for establishing the norms for the figure of the modern artist. Our research has followed various embodiments of this function. The multitude of names designating these embodiments pertain to various working styles, attitudes and mentalities. Only one dimension seems to be common: their masculinity.

Full text here.

the Blind Museum presents: Future Exhibition Preview.

Future Exhibition Preview

part of the Open for Inventory collective project, Platforma Contemporary Art Space, October 2012.Participants: Marina Albu, Emil Avasilichioaiei&Sabin Gârea, Ștefan Bandalac, Raluca Croitoru, Larisa David, Marian Dumitru, Ileana Faur, Cosmina Ivanov, Iulia Mocanu, Veda Popovici/muzeul orb, Diana Ursan.  
Facilitator: Simona Dumitriu
The project consisted of the exploration of the collection of Romanian art of the National Museum of Contemporary Art by a group of artists that eventually developed works/interventions/concepts starting from the material found in the deposit. As a result, a number of artworks from the 70s and 80s were taken out of the deposit and exhibited.

The Blind Museum's intervention in the collection was to select works pertaining to the nationalist tendency of the 70's and 80's and to exhibit them facing the wall, in what seems to be an exhibition that is just about to be mounted. The "Future Exhibition" is a glimpse into a not-so-improbable future where nationalism is again in the institutional spotlight.

Each artwork awaits to be hung on a nail hammered in the wall just above it.

Details: "Vasile Pop N., Hommage to the Great Unification, 1983" (left) and "Patriotic composition" (right).

On the back of each artwork there is the title. The audience is left to imagine how the artworks actually look by reading the titles, and thus participating in their actualization.

the Blind Musem, model for a building and poster for the next exhibition.
(the Blind Museum at the Ist Fair of the Spectral Institutions, June 2011, Gallery of Contemporary Art, Brukenthal Museum, Sibiu, Romania). Photo frames (plaster).





Details.
Above: text on the base of the model;
(The Blind Museum – model for a future site. -poster for the next exhibition: Marcel Broodthaers, Musee d’Art Moderne. Department des Aveugles/Museum of Modern Art. Department for the Blind.
Scale 1: 2000)
Under: print on the top of the model.

Muzeul Orb/the Blind Museum

The Blind Museum, established in 2010, is an autonomous institution with the aim of negotiating the lacks in history based on the museum's authority. Claiming itself form the particularities of 20th century art system, BM doesn’t have any models to forward. It exists even though it doesn’t (yet) shelter or exhibit works of art. The museum is in search of both a premises and a gaze which to model.
The condition that launched the Museum is the lack of historical discourses of recent Romanian art. As a young artist that needs to reflect upon the history of his/hers society and needs to find within this history artists and works to which to react to, either critically or in admiration, the lack of coherent narratives of recent art history is reclaimed as an aberration. The Blind Museum is the context in which this situation is reflected upon.
Further on, the institution developed into reflections on the authoritative nature of the institution of the museum, the ideology of the white cube and the hegemony of masculine canon in Western art.
Recently, the museum has worked as a framework for identifying invisible mechanisms of power involving contemporary and historical conditions.
It remains an institution which elaborates on a formalism of dystopia and paradox.

The Blind Museum , first opening, Atelier 35, april 2010. Views of the installation below:

Muzeul Orb/the Blind Museum (NOTEXT)

NOTEXT, plexiglass support with black marker

Muzeul Orb/the Blind Museum (bandaged paintings)

Muzeul Orb/the Blind Museum (statement)

statement, transparent foil, 40 pieces.

the Blind Museum is closed.
It has nothing to offer, nothing to see. Here images are missing, they are hidden, postponed. The gaze does not fall, does not slide on anything but remains blocked, stopped.
It is non-gaze.
The works of art that the museum shelters do not seduce, do not offer meaning. They are still flounderings. Preserved, restored, archived for no one.
It could be the effect of
a history of aggressive shifting of meaning, of censorship and oppression.
It is the articulation of something that is in the back of the mind, behind the eyelashes.
The horizon that one can see is foggy. It is disorientation.
A tradition that does not offer anything produces offsprings emptied of identity.
An identity that can borrow from anywhere, can
fill itself with anything, it can be torn and then resumed.
the Blind Museum is in a fine balance of negation. It pendulates subtly, with whispers between promise-suspicion-hesitation-postponement.
It could give, it could take.
Visibility is censored here, what one can see is what an aborted sight can see,
a sight that does not reach far,
a suppressed sight.
the museum provokes the Museum. But it does so with whispered shouts. It weakens it
with whispers. MO is an inoperable instrument of Modernity.
It could be the announcement of a failure or of a success.
It is neither good, nor evil.
It does not try to form subjectivities, moralities or aesthetics. It is
a decayed patriarch, aged and crippled. And, thus, harmless.

Muzeul Orb/The Blind Museum (catalogue)

selection of 40 still images that form the catalogue.

the Catalogue, book/object, canvas, photo stills, hand sewn.