ZONA &

ZONA & is a performance programme featured in the closing event of Timișoara 2023, hosted by MX—Corneliu Mikloși Museum of Public Transport from December 8 to 10, 2023. Curated by Corina Oprea and Magda Radu, in collaboration with Ileana Pintilie, the event revisits the Zona Festival, a significant cultural phenomenon in Timișoara during the 1990s. The programme, spanning performance, exhibition, and discussions, explores the historical context and impact of the original festival while incorporating contemporary perspectives.

Artists SERAFINE1369, ILYICH, Teodor Graur, Manuel Pelmuș, Dan Perjovschi, Lia Perjovschi, Elvisey Pisică and QUARTO contribute, showcasing performances, as an artistic genre, which also functions as a mode of resistance through which the body gains freedom against the disciplinary pressures of social construction and knowledge boundaries, formulating new proposals, fictions, and liberating utopias.

ZONA & aims to provoke a reconsideration of the history of performance, starting with Zona as its main vector of this type of artistic practice that exploded on Romania’s scene in the early 1990s. It also offers new methodologies for reflecting on a medium that is challenging to fit into conventional exhibition and mediation formulas. Broadening the scope aims to anchor the programme in a planetary understanding of contemporary performance, extending beyond Zona’s episode and its local boundaries, as the festival’s original ambition was to establish interregional contacts in a Europe striving to break free from the isolation imposed by the Cold War. 

The exhibition, open until December 20, 2023, includes a comprehensive presentation of a set of materials—videos, documents, photographs, artworks—which provide a representation of the Zona Festival archive, highlighting each edition individually. The exhibition design forms an architectural landscape that performs a long line connecting all the editions of Zona Festival and permeates areas of performance for contemporary alliances and the agora space for discussion around performance art. 

Artists featured in the exhibition: Alexandru Antik, József Bartha, Sándor Bartha, Ștefan Bertalan, Rudolf Bone, Geta Brătescu, Nenad Dančuo, Oskar Dawicki, Biljana Klarić Klara & Nataša Teofilović, Suzana Fântânariu, Ion Grigorescu, Karen Kipphoff, André Stitt & Roddy Hunter, Dan Perjovschi, Lia Perjovschi, Eugenia Pop, Ütö Gusztáv & Kónya Réka, Artur Tajber, Sorin Vreme

Curators: Corina Oprea and Magda Radu 

Event designed in collaboration with curator and art historian Ileana Pintilie 

Space Design: Atelier Ad-hoc 
Production: Radu Leșevschi, Solitude Project

Venue
Corneliu Mikloși Museum of Public Transport

Media contacts
corina.oprea [​at​] centruldeproiecte.ro, magda.radu [​at​] centruldeproiecte.ro

ZONA& is part of „Neverending Timișoara 2023” - the event dedicated to the official closing of the Cultural Programme “Timișoara - European Capital of Culture in 2023” - financed by the Municipality of Timișoara, coordinated and organized by the Center for Projects.