Ioana Nemeș: Times Colliding
Between Bridges presents an exhibition by Romanian conceptual artist Ioana Nemeș (1979–2011), to date the first solo show of the artist in a non-commercial art space in Germany. Trained as a professional handball player, an injury led to her changing path and becoming an artist. She went to study photography at the National University of Arts in Bucharest, before leaving the lens-based medium behind to immerse herself in a cross-media practice that was rooted in her investigations of time and language. These she conducted both individually and in collaboration with collectives Rozalb de Mura, Apparatus 22, and Kilobase Bucharest. Acclaimed as one of the most significant Romanian artists of her generation, the exhibition at Between Bridges offers a celebration of Ioana Nemeș’s practice, aligning itself aesthetically and discursively with her last solo show in New York.
Driven by the desire “to record, dissect, understand and describe intangible things such as life or time”, Nemeș developed a methodology of day-to-day assessments based on a distinct set of parameters: ‘physical’ (abbreviated as P), ‘emotional’ (E), ‘intellectual’ (I), ‘financial’ (F), and ‘luck’ (L). These factors were evaluated and scored on a numerical spectrum from -10 up to +10, with each day then subject to a further assessment, denoted by either a plus, minus, or the equals sign. These daily mathematical equations were paired with idiosyncratic diaristic textual fragments by the artist, which combined speculation and skepticism, poetic registers and deadpan cultural critique, personal accounts and macro-narratives. Her writing in these passages is informed by the stream-of-consciousness style associated with Virginia Woolf, whose prose sought to expose the “extraordinary discrepancy between time on the clock and time in the mind”.
The exhibition is jointly curated by Kilobase Bucharest, Fanny Hauser and Viktor Neumann. The exhibition is part of the Theses on Hope series created by Viktor Neumann for Between Bridges.
