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Art House Index (PUB) at Bucharest Biennale 7
Vermeir & Heiremans will present a publicity for Art House Index on an advertisement billboard in the city of Bucharest on the occasion of BB7.
Design: Salome Schmuki.
Curator: Niels Van Tomme
Assistant curator: Charlotte Van Buylaere
As established throughout the curatorial concept entitled What are we building down there? BB7 will highlight the themes of privatization, commercialization, and corporatization of the post-socialist city within its very structure, thereby displacing the biennale onto twenty-one advertising billboards. Dispersed across Bucharest, the billboard signifies high visibility and holds the potential to interact with unique local contexts in ways that traditional modes of exhibition making oftentimes cannot. As such, they act as artistic footnotes to the already existing city infrastructure, opening up new ways of connecting and navigating the city, while making apparent important yet often concealed aspects of its past, present, and future possibilities. By organizing BB7 exclusively on advertising billboards, the biennale will radically and publicly appropriate Bucharest smoothest and most visible two-dimensional commercial surfaces. The biennale, instead of being an actor working against all-pervasive processes of commercialization, thus acts as one of many possible conduits through which to imagine novel modes of non-oppositional dissent. Working closely with the artists, it simultaneously revives an almost anachronistic mode of site-specific artistic intervention in physical space, right at the magnified and materialized outpost of our spam-infused everyday existence. Drawing on the utopian ideals of the historical avant-garde with regards to the liberating and educational potential of advertising as well as the more deviant culture-jamming practices of collectives such as the Billboard Liberation Front, BB7 reinterprets the billboard's inherent experimental potential to activate new ways of looking at, interpreting, and/or moving around within present day Bucharest. The twenty-one locations will act as vantage points from which to position oneself towards recent urban developments within Bucharest. The biennale will thus reveal a stratified urban context in which the billboard holds a foremost symbolic importance, if only for its ever-more proliferating presence and political, as well as economic and cultural power. http://www.bucharestbiennale.org/concept/
A map and an app for iOS/Android will be available to navigate the biennial, which will be displaced onto 21 billboards across Bucharest.
The publication of BB7 will be released in September 2016 by Onomatopee Projects.
Participating artists http://www.bucharestbiennale.org/participants/