A collective intervention in CriticAtac Magazine
with Corina Lucia Apostol
English version here
What began as an interview between art critic and artist-duo, evolved into a debate over the condition of women cultural workers active in the Romanian art scene today. Corina L. Apostol, art historian, and The Bureau of Melodramatic Research (thereafter BMR), an institution founded in 2009 by Irina Gheorghe and Alina Popa, decided to do away with the normative format of a Q&A, in order to deconstruct the circumstances that brought their collaboration into being along the lines of feminist critique. The BMR is known for cooperating with or infiltrating cultural institutions at home and abroad in order to de-mystify the function of gendered emotional capital in the matrix of social, political and economic relations that govern these organizational bodies. Working together, we would like to address general conditions of inequality that direct the reception, interpretation and production of art and culture by women (in our local context and abroad) to make them visible and discernible – and to plant these concerns squarely at the center of cultural debates.
