Cristian Nae
Bereich: Theorie
Key Facts
Nationalität
RumänienBereich
TheorieWohnort
IasiEmpfehlende Institution
tranzit.org/ERSTE StiftungZeitraum
Mai 2014 - Mai 2014Cristian Nae is Ph.D. Associate Professor of Art Theory at George Enescu University of Arts, Iasi. He is currently member of the editorial board of Artmargins journal and writes art criticism on a regular basis for different contemporary art magazines such as IDEA, ARTA etc. He has been a NEC and Getty-NEC fellow of the Institute for Advanced Studies in Bucharest and has conducted a Patterns_Lectures grant on the topic of Politics of Identity in Eastern European Art since 1989 awarded by Erste Stiftung and WUS Austria for developing a new course at the University of Arts in Iasi. He is also a member of different professional associations such as College Arts Association in the USA and AICA. He is the author of two books on art theory in Romanian language. His most recent texts have been included in international publications such as “Romanian Cultural Resolution” (ed. Adrian Bojenoiu and Alexandru Niculescu, Hatje Cantz, 2011) and "Curating Eastern Europe and Beyond:
Art Histories through the Exhibition” (ed. Maria Oriskova, Veda & Peter Lang Publishing, 2014). Between 2007 and 2011 he has been curator of Vector studio for artistic practices and debates in Iasi, developing various educational projects and curating a series of 10 exhibitions dedicated to the promotion of emerging Romanian artists.
My current research projects include the comparative analysis of post-socialism and post-colonialism, focusing on the impact of large scale exhibitions in reconstructing global imaginaries and, in a broader sense, in promoting a revisionist art historical discourse.
During my residency in Vienna, I will study the tension between the narrative and documentary dimension of photographic and video art practices in relation to space and architecture in Central Europe since 1989 in the framework of a larger-scale exhibition project. I am particularly interested in examining the critical function of utopia in the discourse of several contemporary artists, especially when it is used as a cultural background against which different forms of present-day heterochronias may be compared and understood. I will conduct interviews with artists such as Andreas Fogarasi, Dominik Lang, Tobias Putrih and Thomas Svoboda, and research existing bibliography concerning methodologies of artistic research used by these artists dealing with different meanings of modernity and different strategies of remembrance, actualization and materialization of the past living.
Another significant part of my theoretical research will also involve the archives of institutions such as MUMOK, the Kontakt Collection of Erste Bank and Generali Foundation, where I am interested not only in examining the formation of a certain institutional discourse, but also in preparing a future exhibition project on the topic of narrating, rewriting and re-imagining the past in different socio-political and cultural contexts.