Curator: Timea Junghaus
Artists: Ioana Mihaela Cîmpeanu & Sead Kazanxhidu (RomaMoMa)
The exhibited works represent ERIAC's contribution to the central exhibition Chronic Desire.
Mihaela Ionela Cîmpeanu was born in Băilești, in southwest Romania, in a family of young Roma. Her father came from a family of bricklayers and became a construction worker. Her mother was unemployed. She is the eldest of five children in the family. When he was one year old, they all moved to Craiova. He attended middle school and then high school, where he discovered his talent for drawing. She was then admitted to the Arts High School and graduated with the highest marks. After graduation, in 1999, he attended a public administration course. In 2000 he moved to Bucharest, where he attended a journalism course and specialized in press photography. Later, she worked at a Bucharest newspaper, "Curierul Național", and as a painter at the Buftea film studios. He graduated from the Faculty of Sculpture at the National Academy of Fine and Applied Arts in Bucharest. Her work was featured in the exhibition "Paradise Lost" in Pavilion I Rome, curated by Timea Junghaus for the 52nd International Art Exhibition La Biennale di Venezia in 2007.
Sead Kazanxhiu is a visual artist from Baltëz-Fier in southwest Albania, currently living and working in Tirana. creates in various media, paints, makes installations, videos and performances. Kazanxhiu's work as an artist and, more generally, as a cultural producer, reflects his position as an Albanian citizen of Roma ethnicity. Deeply aware of how social and political hierarchies within the nation-state reinforce unequal privilege and prevent participation, Kazanxhiu's practice focuses on issues related to politics, activism, prejudice, exclusion and the environment. His creation of resourceful images of a single artist to restore the dignity of a cultural group that has been forcibly and unjustly marginalized within the structures of European democracy. With eight personal exhibitions, program since 2012 (in Tirana, Budapest and Brussels), and many group exhibitions, including Documenta cinci and Manifesta 14, he is considered one of the most involved young artists on the contemporary white cultural scene.
RomaMoMA is a joint initiative of the European Roma Institute for Art and Culture (ERIAC) and OFF-Biennale Budapest. RomaMoMA is a contemporary art project that initiates a forum for collaborative reflection on a future contemporary art museum for Roma, with the involvement of local and international Roma and non-Roma artists, cultural experts, social scientists . and from the civil sphere.
In the form of a contemporary artistic project that involves several communities of actors and exploits the possibilities of collective thought and discourse, as well as the critical and discursive potential of modern art, RomaMoMA "creates" itself, evolves "prefiguratively". It is an imaginary, but also natural space, which hosts both Roma art and Roma artists.
Rather, the realization of a specific museum concept, connects a series of programs (exhibition, film projection, performances, workshops, etc.), modeling a nomadic and flexible institutional functioning, which raises questions about the devices of contemporary art.