Number of Sessions: 8.
Duration: 2 hours.
Calendar :
For Romanian Participants
Sessions on Saturday:
4, 11, 25 April / 9, 16, 30 May / 6, 13 June
For Foreign Participants
Sessions on Wednesday and Thursday
1, 2, 8, 9 April / 29, 30, 13, 14 May
Minimum 10 persons, maximum 15 persons. All the required materials will be made available by MARe/Muzeul de Artă Recentă.
The Sense Factory addresses to those who love art, read, attend art courses and conferences delivered by experts of this field, and yet they still crave for more. Why so? Because in the beginning they like Rembrandt, Van Gogh or a landscape by Andreescu, but then they stumble upon specialists talking numbers, rating, investments, social politics and attitudes or semiotics, structures, golden ratios, hermeticism, and autism. In this way, they receive a package of knowledge alienating them from art, from art that instead of being around its lovers it is thusly laid outside in the far reach.
The Sense Factory speaks to those who, allured by art, realize they are not satisfied by this cognitive distance, but wish to sink inside its skin, to dismiss sophisticated procedures and technologies which can only point that this territory of pleasure is just another passion killer field. The sense factory helps you regard art despite the sense brokers.
The Sense Factory swipes the routine of regarding art as reproduction requiring a neutral, aseptic discourse, as belonging to someone else, far away. It retrieves the aspiration of intimacy with the art object. It is a path through which the participants became genuine protagonists of the relation with art. The protagonists, not the professionals, since this program aims to preserve and encourage the subjectivity of the art lovers. The sense factory transforms its participants from sense receivers into sense makers. It pays sense back to its subjects – the ones who keep art close, in their homes, in their offices, in their minds and memories, in front of their cameras, among their friends and children, inside their own present.
The Sense Factory is about how you hang a picture on the wall, how you frame a photo and how you set a sculpture in your room, about how you observe its conservation status, its development throughout time, the problems its pedestal or framework may have, how it reacts to changes in temperature, humidity and luminosity. It is about how you relate this living organism with the inner discourse and how you set it in the external space, about how you connect one work with another and the entire assembly with the surrounding environment. It is about how and why you choose a frame, about the proper height to hang a work, about the type of passe-partout for the work, about the angle from which you observe it, but also about the story it blazes in your mind, memory and emotion, about how the art object grows to be part of its receiver, to whom it speaks and at the same time it exposes to those around, connecting them. The sense factory brings art back to its domestic and cosmic function. In a public institution or museum one wouldn’t encounter such a program for unlearning the socializing of art while learning the personal and emotional embedding in art. The reason is that a public context features clerks dealing with works of art they don’t possess, works belonging to the anonymous society.
At MARe/Museum of Recent Art, art found its own home. Art is re-privatized, subjectivized, it is a personal affair. The Sense Factory brings towards its public’s subjectivity works of art belonging to a private collector. These works are transferred from the private domain of the artist (who will be presented in advance) towards the private domain of the collector (who will also be described) in order to get in the (temporarily) private domain of the participant who wants to absorb this art. The sense factory offers privileged access to over 600 works of contemporary art belonging to the collection of MARe/Museum of Recent Art, stacked in the recently installed storage of the museum. There, each participant can make its own selection of works they want to refer to in their discussions.
Afterwards, after the presentation of all the works selected by the participants, they will be reunited in two groups who will make, through those works (which can be supplied with other works, from other sources), their own exhibitions. They will become the curators of their own aesthetic options and will work not with images or reproductions but with real works, which they will prepare to be exhibited for themselves and for the group members. The two groups will motivate their curatorial options through debates inside the entire circle of participants. Eventually, after each team is handed its tasks (some members can act as documenters, others as photographers or as designers for promotional materials for the show, or actual assemblers of the exhibition), they will elaborate the context and conditions in which the selection they proposed can be exhibited at MARe/Museum of Recent Art with the technical assistance of the museum staff. Alongside with the coordinator of The Sense Factory, each team will conceive an exhibiting plan and a curatorial concept which will reflect the relation of the members with the selection of works, but also essays which will support their options and curatorial intentions. As the possibilities will allow it, these texts can become curatorial texts inside the exhibition or even inside published catalogues.
Throughout this entire program, there will be organized a trip abroad (two days) so that the participants can experience an opening at some art gallery and institution exhibiting a Romanian contemporary artist. In this way, the participants will enter directly inside that invisible tissue of the world of today’s art, through an immediate connection not only to art creators but also to those building the curatorial discourse of present day, along with collectors, critics and the foreign public of the works produced by Romanian artists. This will widen and enhance the sense that The Sense Factory factory targets for its participants.
