It gives us great pleasure to invite you on Sunday, July 16, from 18:00 to the official launch of the Catalog of the Art Encounters Biennial 2023, My Rhino is Not a Myth. art science fictions. The event will take place at the La Două Bufnițe bookstore, where you can also purchase this special volume in the presence of curator Adrian Notz and his curatorial collective.
The catalog follows multiple parallel narratives, possible paths, or scenarios to follow for a mission that far exceeds the boundaries of the Art Encounters Biennial 2023. The curatorial collective that shaped its content, Cristina Bută, Monica Dănilă, Edith Lázár, Ann Mbuti, Cristina Stoenescu, and Georgia Țidorescu, led by Adrian Notz, the guest curator of this edition, managed to transform the catalog into a dynamic, plural, and open instrument, following the “way of the rhino” through four possible streams: Carriers of New Seeds, Anticipations and Sighs, Broken Cyphers, and Streams of Navigation.
These four streams are sewn together like four magazine issues to reveal “the nuances of the intertwined relationships between art, politics, science, and technology, in various temporalities.”
- Carriers of New Seeds studies postcolonial thinking and more-than-human knowledge, providing the framework for imagining different futures.
- Anticipations and Sighs is the section thematically closest to the ethos of dark sci-fi, invoked here to depict collapsing and new worlds.
- Broken Cyphers relies on language, with its structures and protocols, codes and ciphers perceived as ways to invoke the existence of something in images, symbols, spells, and AI technologies.
- Streams of Navigation is the section guided by conceptual tools that enable communication between multiple temporalities and histories.
The catalog contextualizes the practices of the artists present in the Biennial through contributions designed especially for the publication, punctuated by scientific ideas and literary extracts that evoke artistic and curatorial concerns. On the other hand, the main body of the publication is introduced by the texts of the curatorial collective, which all tell the story of the rhinoceros and explore its influence on the artistic and scientific imagination, in which the authors experiment with critical, narrative, and poetic writing techniques.
Last but not least, the non-linear reading of this book, the abandonment of the alphabetical order of artists’ introduction used until now, the emphasis on harmonizing the catalog format and the artists’ contributions, as well as the outstanding design of the graphic artist Stefanie Preis, are all ingredients of a dense and necessary book, bearing witness to a unique authorial constellation (excerpt from the editorial note signed by Diana Marincu & Georgiana Buț).
We, therefore, invite all of you on Sunday, from 18:00 to the last trademark event of the Art Encounters Biennial 2023!