You Are Another Me - A Cathedral of the Body

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 which 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 filmic 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. Statement by curators Cosmin Costinaș and Viktor Neumann: “Pintilie’s contribution to the Romanian Pavilion is inscribed in a lineage of artists who have responded over the past two decades to the question of national representation. It continues a conversation about who represents the nation and who is excluded, about collective shame and responsibility, on the background of Romanian society’s fraught history of dealing with intimacy, sexuality, and bodily diversity, and by extension with solidarity between the individuals forming a perpetually fractured nation. Against the backdrop of a public sphere haunted by biopolitical control, religious and cultural conservatism, and a traditionally corrosive climate of shame, the Romanian Pavilion is conceived as a site to reflect upon the body as a device to process recognized and unrecognized history, trauma, and desires. Engaging with these complex narratives of institutionalized normativity and their habitual denial of the body, Pintilie transforms the historically loaded Romanian Pavilion into a contemporary ‘cathedral’ that celebrates the body and human connections beyond any preconceptions.” While contributing to the current conversations towards reassessing the normative in gender, sexuality, bodily ability and diversity, Pintilie's perspective is distinctive through her particular visual universe and aesthetics, as well as through a sophisticated and seductive rethinking of the role and power of the moving image. Emerging from her personal experiences, background and research and nurtured by long-term collaboration with her protagonists, Pintilie’s idiosyncratic methodology explores the central role of intimacy in the everyday, centering on embodied practices and deep psychological investigations inspired by Family Constellations, attachment theory, psychosomatics, trauma therapy, and bodywork practices. Together with the protagonists, over a multi-year period and through different artistic languages, Pintilie’s practice challenges conventions not only in terms of content, but also of visual language. Thus, You Are Another Me explores, in the grammar of an art installation, issues around how we relate to each other and to our own bodies, calling into question regimes of seeing in these different fields. Spanning across countries, generations, and backgrounds, her collaborators include: performers Hermann Müller and Dirk Lange, disability rights activists Christian Bayerlein and Grit Uhlemann, performer and teacher Laura Benson, transgender activist and sex worker Hanna Hofmann, performance artist and musician Paula Dunker, queer theologian and academic Victor Ciobotaru, among others. According to the curators: “There is a particular timeliness about presenting this project at the first visual art edition of the Venice Biennale since the start of the pandemic and its deep transformative impact on our world. This virus unequivocally marks a paradigmatic shift for the politics of touch, alongside many others on personal, societal, and political levels, bringing about often contradictory new realities: physical distance and isolation as well as new forms of connection; a deeper acknowledgement of the frailty and impermanence of the body, of life, and of the world, as well as renewed needs for solidarity and for building diverse alliances. At the same time, repressive institutions, ideologies, and political regimes are re-strengthening, estranging bodies from their own needs and agency. In this context, a self-reflective, and non- judgmental exploration of the realms of intimacy and corporeality is ever more urgent. As noted by the artist herself, in the spirit of the Mayan greeting ‘You are Another Me’, A Cathedral of the Body places our connection to the bodies of others and to our own at the center of our personal and political lives.” Adina Pintilie is an artist, filmmaker and curator working between Romania and Germany. On the fluid border between reality and imagination, her works emerge from artistic research processes with a profound community impact, distinguished through radical aesthetics and a bold, uncompromising exploration of the human psyche. Her feature film Touch Me Not won the Golden Bear at the 2018 Berlinale, was nominated for the EFA European Film Academy Awards and screened at major cultural institutions and events such as MoMA New York, ICA Institute of Contemporary Art London, BOZAR Brussels, BFI London, IDFA Amsterdam, Toronto Film Festival, Viennale, Harvard Film Archive, Karlovy Vary, Sydney Film Festival and many more. Cosmin Costinaș is the executive director/curator of Para Site, Hong Kong, since 2011, and the artistic director of the Kathmandu Triennale 2022. He is one of the most internationally active Romanian curators, recent winner of the Bega Art Prize. He was guest curator at Dakar Biennale - La Biennale de l'Art Africain Contemporain - DAK'ART and Dhaka Art Summit (both in 2018), and co-curator of the 10th Shanghai Biennale (2014). From 2008 to 2011, he was curator of the BAK center, Utrecht. He was also co-curator of the first Ural Industrial Biennale, Ekaterinburg (2010), and editor of documenta 12 magazines, Kassel (2005 - 2007). He has edited and contributed to numerous books, magazines, and exhibition catalogs and has taught and lectured at various universities, art academies, and institutions around the world. Viktor Neumann is a Berlin-based curator and art historian, he has curated exhibitions and projects for institutions such as Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, Museum of Modern Art, Warsaw, Bildmuseet Umeå, Total Museum, Seoul, NCCA Ekaterinburg, Württembergischer Kunstverein Stuttgart and Kunstverein für die Rheinlande und Westfalen, Düsseldorf. He was co-curator of the transnational Parliament of Bodies, co-curator of Bergen Assembly 2019, Curatorial Assistant for documenta 14 and Assistant Curator for the 3rd Moscow International Biennale for Young Art. He has been teaching internationally, most recently as Guest Professor for Curatorial Studies at Karlsruhe University of Arts and Design. Together with Eva Birkenstock and Nikola Dietrich, he is co-curator of the multi-cycle project reboot: at Ludwig Forum for International Art, Aachen and Kölnischer Kunstverein, Cologne. Commissioner: Attila Kim Curators: Cosmin Costinas and Viktor Neumann

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