Temps d’Images 2015: Common body
7-14 November 2015

What does it mean to work in artistic collectives where ideas are a common good and the individual authorship is no longer visible by itself?

How do we manage group membership, solidarity and integration in relation with the need to keep one’s own individuality and creative voice? Do we need a common body in order to make our voice heard, both individually and collectively? Or do we need heroes, isolated personalities to represent us? Are the common body and common goods a fiction?

Continuing the curatorial line that follows the performative mapping of the most important and acute socio-political themes of the contemporary world, this edition of the Temps d’Images festival questions the Common Body through a wide range of exhibitions and debates (Nick Srnicek, Helen Hester, Raluca Voinea), but also through performances: the Romanian premiere of Alexandra Badea’s Pulverisés (directed by Frédéric Fisbach), about the dehumanizing globalization of jobs, the stage reading of Yann Verburgh’s Ogres, Raul Coldea and Petro Ionescu’s show, Provisory, an approach to social invisibility in Romania, The State, a performance by Alexander Manuiloff (Bulgaria) about the common values of citizenship, and the puppet performance of the visual artist Ciprian Mureșan, Untitled. A special section is dedicated to young emerging artists: Staff, a performance by Andreea David and Ingrid Berger, and Ghinga, a dramatization of Dan Coman’s novel. The Festival will also host an event about feminine football, Marta Popivoda’s (Serbia) film projection – Yugoslavia, How Ideology Moved Our Collective Body, and book launches.

Productions that question collaborative methods of artistic work, as well as our life’s (de)solidarities are all part of the Independent Platform of Performing Arts. Because You’re Worth It (observational project, coordinated by Bogdan Georgescu), confronts the normative pressures on women’s bodies. The patriarchal way of thinking is questioned in You Might as Well Have Sung the Swedish National Anthem – Farid Fairuz’s one on one performance, while another one on one, Mădălina Dan’s The Agency of Touch, has as a stake the rediscovery of the tactile body. You Haven’t Seen Anything! (one-man-show created by Alex Fifea, Cătălin Rulea and David Schwartz) stages social abuse, while Our Daily Hunger (Radu Apostol & Ana Mărgineanu) proposes a direct exploration of the nature of poverty and the way in which fiction can influence reality, and Domestic Products (Ioana Păun and Xandra Popescu) brings together the themes of domestic exploitation of women, abuse and precarity.

Yet again, the Festival has commissioned and coproduced two performances that tackle delicate and seldom represented subjects: pornographic violence and the way it infiltrates daily human relations (Cunthate [Ură] by Nico Vaccari), identitary construction and the complicated social interactions of transgender people in Romania (She’s a Good Boy, a one-man-show by Eugen Jebeleanu, with Florin Caracala).

This edition’s associated artist is Alexandra Pirici, whose practice incorporates contemporary dance, visual arts, experimental music (as Adda Kaleh). In 2013, she co-signed, together with Manuel Pelmuș, An Immaterial Retrospective of the Venice Biennale, and her works have been presented at Hebbel am Ufer, Berlin, Bass Museum of Art in Miami, Centre Pompidou, Manifesta 10 etc. In Temps d’Images, Alexandra Pirici has been invited to present Delicate Instruments Handled with Care, an ongoing action coproduced by imagetanz/brut Vienna and The National Dance Centre that reflects the artist’s preoccupation with individual memory as subjective archive and bringing museum art to a corporeal-human dimension.