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Thu 13/11
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SANDWICH LIBRARY

Malmaison Studios
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+40 721 225 660
Malmaison Studios, CALEA PLEVNEI 137C 2ND FLOOR
Screening

Performing 798

With Liliana Basarab, Daniela Palimariu, Cristian Răduță & Dan Vezentan
Curated by Maria Bîrsan
Performing 798 is a collective video-performance work produced in September 2024 by artists Liliana Basarab, Daniela Palimariu, Cristian Răduță and Dan Vezentan, together with curator Maria Bîrsan. By activating familiar objects found in the 798 Art Zone or by reworking recurrent performance gestures, the participants address the process of art-making during times of scarce resources, using their own bodies in impromptu situations. Merging with the Chinese teenagers coming to this comparatively “free” district to cosplay and livestream, the participants traced performative lines through the perpetual tension and surveillance embedded in the surroundings. Repurposed from a former military factory, originally designed in 1951 as a collaboration between the Soviet Union and the People’s Republic of China, the 798 Art Zone (Chaoyang District, Beijing, China) now hosts a mix of Chinese and international galleries, cultural institutes from across the world, and design companies, creating, within its perimeter, a crossover between a friendly interface for foreign audiences and dusty corners of authentic local cuisine. Even though their space was limited to the borders of the Art Zone, the artists found numerous opportunities to interact with it through various art objects and props – Dan Vezentan’s horse tassels and bells, Liliana Basarab’s tied-together sandals, Daniela Palimariu’s message flag, and Cristian Răduță’s found flower bouquet function as liants throughout a complex geometric spatial structure, linking performers to the environment. __ Performing 798 was produced as part of the project “Garage Sale - Made in Romania and China”, co-funded by The Romanian Cultural Institute through the Cantemir Program. Team: Daniela Pălimariu, Alexandru Niculescu, Maria Bîrsan, Cristian Răduță, Dan Vezentan, Liliana Basarab

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SANDWICH LIBRARY came into being to provide access for artists, curators, and art enthusiasts, especially young and less well-off ones, with a way to stay in touch with the state of global art commentary and to facilitate larger-scale reach to cultural readings in a country where they are absent. ​ With a rapidly developing art scene, Romania has an utter shortfall of publicly accessible reading material on topics related to arts and culture. The only open-access, free library of the sort in the whole country is the one hosted by the National Contemporary Art Museum (MNAC), whose collection mainly centers on dated pieces, which must be consulted on-site only. It is also worth mentioning that even the largest art university (UNArte) lacks a book repository of its own. When it comes to paid sources, there are only two single-person-run bookstores in Bucharest that import leading-edge publications, whose offer, however, is rather scarce and certainly unaffordable. We thus set out to establish the first and only open-to-all, free-of-charge, borrow-and -return basis library dedicated to visual arts, curatorial studies, architecture, and performance in Bucharest. Its physical location, inside Malmaison Studios, is also intended to function as an educational and networking space, by setting up a book club, workshops, film projections, and other events.