Life a User's Manual - Art Encounters 2017 - Contemporary Art Biennale

Art Encounters 2017 lies at the intersection between an experimental art festival and a contemporary art biennial, and focuses on Romania’s cultural connections with its geographic neighbours. Entitled Life a User’s Manual, the central exhibition curated by Ami Barak and Diana Marincu, will survey and compile fragments from everyday life, as seen in both current artistic practices and historical art projects from the 1960s onwards.

The biennial has been developed through an extensive programme of curatorial research and will bring together a group of international artists who will engage in meaningful dialogues with the region’s artistic discourses and communities. The exhibition will be embedded across a wide range of cultural and public venues in Timisoara and Arad, and will highlight the ways in which artists reflect on many day-to-day realities that are now becoming increasingly unstable.

Like in Georges Perec’s novel, La vie mode d’emploi, the exhibition will present characters, situations and contexts – stories that span not only over a day, but also a lifetime. As the fluxus artist Robert Filliou said, “art is what makes life more interesting than art”.

Curators: Ami Barak, Diana Marincu