Art is Always Somewhere Else

“Overlapping Biennial” is the title of the new edition of “The Biennial of Young Artists” and it will take place in Bucharest in October 2012. This edition proposes an innovative concept not only from the perspective of the events organized by META Cultural Foundation so far, but also from the perspective of visual art Biennials from all over the world.

We will keep the slogan of every biennial that took place in the past years – “Art is always somewhere else”, but we will take it to whole new level with a different structure.

Considering the fact that almost every biennial is looking for a new configuration, a new shape and that the curatorial programs and discourses tend to replace the artistic ones, we plan to combine these two ideas.

This event will overlap, interlace, will have a different approach to all these discourses related to a phenomena which is becoming increasingly spread at global level: the Biennial. Each artist and each curator have their own perception regarding the structure of a biennial and we are interested to see how all these different approaches form the layers of a single event.

“Overlapping Biennial” is going to be mostly a virtual event where the only connection between reality and the virtual world will be made through a totally neutral visual representation (a matrix barcode – QR code).

Each “QR code” will represent an artwork (which will be accessed individually through a hyperlink). These codes will be placed in different physical locations in Bucharest, both indoor (bookshops, libraries, cultural centers, museums, galleries etc.) and outdoor (in the Bucharest urban environment) so that each individual can scan it with his phone and become a visitor of the Biennial. This way, visitors don’t have a direct perception of the artworks in the physical space, but have an indirect contact through a virtual means. At the same time, they will be able either to save this information on their phones or email it to see it later – so basically “taking the original artwork with them”.

The QR codes are becoming increasingly spread in museums and art galleries all over the world, as a means of information attached to the artworks. Considering the contemporary age of communication, everything tends to become co-creation, sharing and linking information. We take this to the next level in “Overlapping Biennial” where visual art is seen as visual information, replacing the traditional perception with a code of information. The interactive experience between the viewer and the artwork itself becomes a link at the border between reality and virtual.

The QR code (quick response code) is a matrix bar code which consists of black modules in a square pattern, on a white background. Placing the event in a world which is constantly “moving”, the “quick response” and high speed data transfer concepts create a constant connection between technology, high speed information transfer, labeling and art, real and virtual, physical and abstract, dislocation and relocation of space and time.

Even if each physical QR code can storage up to 7000 numeric characters or over 4000 alphanumeric characters, the amount of virtual visual information exceeds by far these limits.

Overlapping Biennial will have around 10 curators from all over the world. They will be invited by 2META Group (who came up with this curatorial concept – considering their constant preoccupation of META-art). Each curator will propose a number of artists as long as he doesn’t exceed a number MB (megabytes) given to him. In these limits they may propose artists with different visual representations (video, text, image, photography, sound etc.) The voices and discourses of each curator will overlap, forming the core of the future Biennial.

Radu Pervolovici

Biennial of Young Artists Director