Art Encounters 2017 Exhibitions:

Raluca Croitoru (b. 1989) holds a B.A. from UNARTE Bucharest and a Cum Laude M.F.A. degree from the Piet Zwart Institute in Rotterdam. Croitoru’s practice is embedded in the everyday and plays with the politics of representation, abstraction and embodiment in contemporary society. Her ongoing interest in systems of exchange, social choreographies and knowledge hierarchies finds its translation mainly through performances, videos and text.

Most recent performances (selection): Playground Performance Festival@STUK (BE), W139, Tent Rotterdam and Showroom Mama (NL), Bucharest Museum of Contemporary Art, InnerSound #4 Festival (RO), FRANK Gallery (SE), Vogel House Salzburg (AU) and Thessaloniki Museum of Contemporary Art (GR). She has also been a performer for Simone Forti’s Here it Comes exhibition at Vleeshal Center for Contemporary Art (NL), for Action PRL Festival organized by The Centre for Contemporary Art Ujazdowski Castle (PL), and for Katarina Zdjelar’s Tanz für Käthe Kollwitz.

The perfomances of Raluca Croitoru begin from “small, participative social actions we perform in everyday life”. Relevant to global economic-political systems, the actions represent forms of social choreography for the artist. During the biennale, Raluca Croitoru introduces a site-specific performance that strikes up a dialogue with the history of Urseni Water Manufacturing in Timișoara, dating from the beginning of last century, and is presently “deviated” and publicly rediscovered by contemporary heterotopias in the circular form of buildings and specific rules it imposes. Using the shadow as a binding agent between the past and present, the body and space, the individual and collective, the artist searches to draw nearer the multiple histories that coexist and symbolically “contaminate” the bodies of buildings and body of the actors.

Images:

1. Raluca Croitoru, Portrait, photo credits: Tor Jonsson

2. Raluca Croitoru, Suite for Office (2017), performance still, 30’, performers: Adina Orboi, Alina Ștefan, Cristina Daju, Florica Achim, Lavinia Urcan, Lera Kelemen, photo credits: Ovidiu Zimcea