Romanian Pavilion, 59th International Art Exhibition. La Biennale di Venezia
You Are Another Me – A Cathedral of the Body by Cosmin Costinas e Viktor Neumann
Giardini della Biennale and New Gallery of the Romanian Institute for Culture and Humanistic Research, Venezia
April 23 – November 27, 2022

Artist and filmmaker Adina Pintilie has been selected to represent Romania at the 59th International Art Exhibition, La Biennale di Venezia with the project You Are Another Me – A Cathedral of the Body, curated by Cosmin Costinaș and Viktor Neumann. The project has been chosen by a jury of visual art professionals via an open call organized by the Romanian Ministry of Culture, the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, and the Romanian Cultural Institute. It will consist of a multi-channel film installation at the Romanian Pavilion in the Giardini della Biennale, complemented by a VR experience in the New Gallery of the Romanian Institute for Culture and Humanistic Research, and a public program that will run over the course of the biennial.

Developed in collaboration with curators Costinaș and Neumann, You Are Another Me – A Cathedral of the Body marks the next stage of Pintilie’s multi-platform research on the politics and poetics of intimacy and the body, initiated with her feature film Touch Me Not, winner of the Golden Bear at the Berlin International Film Festival 2018. The film has been screened internationally in cinemas and art institutions such as the Museum of Modern Art, New York, ICA London, BOZAR Brussels, and acclaimed worldwide for its boundary-pushing film language and aesthetics. Created in collaboration with artists, activists, institutions, and communities across Europe, her long-term, trans-disciplinary research has been generating a complex visual material that Pintilie explores through different languages and mediums – installation, cinema, interactive performance, publication, and virtual experiences.

Today, the body has, once again, become a contested site for ideologies; a pretext of cultural and political anxiety. Amidst the global resurgence of right-wing ideologies, accelerated during the pandemic, – which also saw a hijacking of the discourses on body autonomy, – and in the midst of growing polarities between people and between belief systems, Pintilie imagines a space of togetherness beyond borders and binaries. The project proposes possibilities to see, to think, and to relate, that destabilize ingrained visual rhetoric and politics of the gaze, making way for new forms of knowing and transformative experiences.

more. www.cathedralofthebody.com