TRANSYLVANIA RETOUCHED. A MATTER OF LANDSCAPE AND REPRESENTATION

Travelling exhibition with works by Anca Benera & Arnold Estefan, Zsolt Fekete, Károly Elekes, Lehel Kovács, Mircea Nicolae, Radu Băieș, Szabolcs Kisspál and MAMŰ. Curated by: Daniela Duca & Virag Major-Kremer

The Transylvanian landscape is unanimously depicted as a space synonymous with scenic natural beauty. A glance at any travel brochure confirms this representation as a nearly mythical landscape with beautiful mountains and rivers, punctuated by glimpses of immemorial sheep herding and other pastoral activities. This representation is consistently and endlessly reproduced, preserving 19th century fantasies of picturesque and romantic landscape.

The exhibition looks critically at the constructed nature of this representation. It demystifies the landscape as neutral, objective, innocent, and averts the attention to the subjective human eye and mind that creates the landscape. By exploring the dynamics of power behind landscape articulations of Transylvania, denaturalizing what is taken for granted, the act of allegedly “neutral” nostalgic contemplation is replaced by a methodology of an inquisitive, reflective nostalgia (Svetlana Boym). Going beyond artistic genres such as landscape painting traditions and land art or contemporary practices, Transylvania Retouched takes the freedom to confront various modes and media of artistic engagement with the landscape: painting, photography, photo documentation, land art action, appropriation art, performance, docu-fictional and quasi-curatorial approaches by artists. The exhibition aims to foreground their commonality as media of representation, their shared frames of reference in human understanding and approach to nature, while asking what is left of nature in such engagements beyond culture and human signification?
By bringing together artists of Romanian and Hungarian origin, the exhibition also engages with the notion of what it could possibly mean to be a Transylvanian artist and how can cultural heritage and traditions possibly be restaged? How can one restate traditions, so that they do not preserve and promote the idea of nation, but they envision instead a way of healing traumas in a potentially transnational and transcultural future?

Organizers / Institutional partners: Romanian Cultural Institute Berlin, Collegium Hungaricum Berlin, Romanian Cultural Institute Budapest, FKSE Studio of Young Artists’ Association Budapest, Magma Contemporary Art Space Sfântu Gheorghe, The Multicultural Center of Transylvania University of Brașov