Cătălin Gheorghe

Cătălin Gheorghe is a theoretician, curator and editor living in Iași (Romania), but travelling mostly in the deep non-spherical space of the Internet. He is currently Professor of Curatorial Research and Praxis and Director of Doctoral School of Visual Arts at “George Enescu” National University of the Arts in Iași, teaching Curatorial Studies and Practices, Theories and Practices of Curatorial Research, Theories and Practices of Artistic Research, and Applicative Visual Studies. He is a member of WG5 Curatorial Studies Workshop of EARN (Extended Artistic Research Network) (http://www.artresearch.eu/working-groups). He is the editor of Vector – critical research in context publication series (that participated in documenta 12 magazines project in Kassel, 2007), editing the books: “Learning by curating. Current trajectories in critical curatorial research” (2022); “Exhibitionary Acts of Political Imagination” (co-editor Mick Wilson, a partnership between Vector [Iași] and PARSE [Gothenburg] (2021); “After the educational turn” (2017); “Post-photography” (co-editor Matei Bejenaru) (2015); “Critical Theories and Creative Practices of Research” (2014); “Exhibiting the ‘Former East’: Identity Politics and Curatorial Practices after 1989” (co-editor Cristian Nae) (2013); “Trial” (artist’s book: Dan Acostioaei) (2012); “Exhibition as [micro]city” (2011); “Vector – critical research in context” (pilot edition co-edited with Livia Pancu) (2010) [www.vector.org.ro]. He is also the curator of Vector – studio for art practices and debates (since 2007), which is a platform for critical research and art production based on the understanding of art as experimental journalism. He has given curatorial talks to a series of art schools and institutions in Northern, Southern, Western, and Eastern Europe. His explorational interests are elaborated around critical artistic research, curatorial critical practices, art as experimental journalism, contemporary art (political) theories, xeno-spaces, xeno-practices, trans(ex)positions, post-capitalism.

Curatorial transformations: from extra-curatorial visitations to an intra-curatorial politics of re-positioning towards a trans-positional thinking

Curatorial processes are influenced not only by historical cross-contaminations (as postsocialist cultural conditions were modelled by neocapitalist aspirations in former Eastern Europe), but also by subjectification inter-actions (as socio-cultural agents developed an understanding of the context through mediations of encounters). This discursive intervention will traverse three kinds of transformations that took place at the fringe of the New Europe, in the border city of Iași (North-East of Romania), after the disintegration of the Eastern Bloc. The first transformative sequence approaches a kind of ‘extra-curaterrestrial’ framework that shaped the context under the influence of the biennialisation of peripheries (as margins/fringes of hegemonic cultural discourse), focussing on the case study of Periferic Biennial in Iasi. The second transformative sequence will describe the paradigm of an ‘intra-curatorial re-localisation’, with a focus on practices of young artists orbiting around the Iasi University of the Arts (from Personal Local Settings to Collateral Heteropedagogies). At last, the third transformative sequence will explore the imagination of what can be called ‘the inter-curatorial’, describing the affective engagement in the feeling of longing to connect to something that is more than local, through the initialisation of local-to-local transmissions.