The
Noua Gallery is a common project of the Center for Contemporary Art, Bucharest,
and the Swiss foundation Pro Helvetia. I am the coordinator of the gallery.
Aurora Dediu
Aurora Dediu is an artist and curator, 31 years old. She graduated in mural painting from the Art Academy of Bucharest.
Aurora is very busy during our stay in Romania, because at that moment, the Noua Gallery has opened. Aurora is the coordinator and curator of the newly opened gallery for contemporary media art and new technologies. At that moment, the first international project, with which the gallery has opened, is being exhibited, <trans café>. The space of the gallery took on the atmosphere of a café club, and in the context of the project, together with several types of coffee, Internet and CD-ROM projects of Romanian artists and well-known foreign authors from the media art scene were "served". The program also included a number of live performances in the gallery space. Fresh and quite in the tradition of what is happening in terms of presenting net art and new technologies in regions more to the west in Europe.
- How did the idea of the Noua Gallery arise? This is a non-commercial space for contemporary art. It's not easy to realize such a project?
The
Noua Gallery is a common project of the Center for Contemporary Art, Bucharest,
and the Swiss foundation Pro Helvetia. I am the coordinator of the gallery.
The program of the gallery is ready till January. All this takes a lot of time, but that's always the case with every new project, there's substantial stress. The plan of the gallery includes also as a guest exhibition "Exchanging Places."
- You are an artist, and at the same time you are working as the coordinator and curator of the new gallery for contemporary art Noua. Doesn't this create tension between you and some of your colleagues?
It doesn't create any contradiction between my colleagues and me. In Romania, many people work on this principle, as a curator and as an artist.
I prefer my work as an artist. I see the project with the Noua Gallery more like something temporary, which allows me to make compromises, "stealing" from my personal time as an artist, so that I can get things going with the project for the gallery, and after that someone else will take it on from there. I don't have a background as a critic or curator, but I see that I can be useful, to help with my knowledge and experience that this space for contemporary art really starts to develop. Here in Romania the public does not have a developed interest towards contemporary art, which is a big problem. I find it very important that we try to develop this interest with the activities of the Noua Gallery, to present the type of projects that will call the attention of the public. For me this is one of the foremost tasks I have set for myself as a coordinator of the Noua Gallery, to arouse this interest, to educate an adequate public for the contemporary situation.
- Marilena Preda Sanc was telling us about one of your projects, a series of interviews with photographs of women, which has, if I understand it right, something in common with my project for "Exchanging Places." Would you like to tell us a bit more about it?
This was a project a few years ago, with interviews and black and white portrait photographs of women. The critic I was working in collaboration with on the project was doing the interviews, and I did the photo portraits to accompany them. I was purposely looking for a more classical approach to the photo portrait. But what was most interesting for me in my work on this project were my discussions with these women. I discovered how all these interesting and well-known women writers, artists, philosophers, actresses, do not define their work as female, and I really liked this.
Dimitrina Sevova - In Someone Else's Skin (2001)
Index of the Interviews