Iasi. Periferic was set up in 1997 as a performance festival, rather like those held in other small towns in Romania in those days. A low-cost solution to publicise and promote contemporary art at a time when serious intellectual discourses in and about art were only just beginning. Periferic kept on growing, which in a certain sense could be described as a heroic achievement, given the state of support for the arts in Romania at the time, until in 2001, after the fifth festival, Vector Group, the organisers, decided to hold the event only once every two years from then on. This allowed them to adopt the symbolic title »biennale«, partly with a view to attracting the attention of international curators, the first of these being Anders Kreuger, who headed up the 2003 event.
However it took three more years for the Periferic Biennale to be launched with »Focussing Iasi«, and this occurred in a significantly different context. In the meantime the National Museum for Contemporary Art had opened in Bucharest and two more wannabe events held every two years had also appeared on the scene, again in Bucharest. In contrast the impoverished, ultra-conservative Orthodox social structures in Iasi, which from 2007 on will be one of the most easterly towns in the European Union, had seen little change in the interim. This major university town lacks a readily identifiable youth cultural scene or indeed any real alternative movement.
In this context the efforts by the Vector team, headed by Matei Bejenaru, to organise Periferic and discuss the organisation’s biennale status, with a broader vision than the conflicts and paradoxes of the statement »What our village needs now is a biennale« , seem rather desperate, or even utterly to no avail. Actually Periferic would be a perfect case study for the debate on the role of biennales, on their role in the local context and on the overlapping intentions and goals of »regional« and »global« biennales, as it is a responsible event motivated by much more than finding an excuse to roll out the red carpet.
The Board of Trustees chose curators from different backgrounds and with slightly different positions, for pragmatic reasons related to the search for sponsors (which later proved a successful tactic). This gave rise to three independent exhibitions and publications, all grouped under the label »Focussing Iasi«.
The »Social Processes« section was curated by Marius Babias (Romanian-born author and curator based in Berlin) and Angelika Nollert (from Siemens Art Program). The idea was that this section would not simply be an exhibition; instead it was conceived as a process that would spur discussion, and as an opportunity to locate a particular strategy for political action in a context that so far has not heard much about these issues or ever really articulated its need for such discussions. In the months leading up to the exhibition most of the artists participating were invited to give public presentations in the town. A further interesting side-effect of the exhibition was the encounter between the new left-wing tradition in Germany and the critical positions of the Romanian artists, ranging from Lia Perjovschi via Dan Perjovschi to H.arta-Gruppe, which had less of an ideological thrust. For a brief period the somewhat dilapidated exotic Turkish bathhouse where Periferic was generally held thus became a launch-pad for tools of realisation and reflection.
»Strategies of Learning«, curated by Swiss-based French curator Florence Derieux, was split between two venues, with two different content-based approaches. In the Biennale venue with the most public visibility – indeed the only site offering such visibility - she organised a kind of archive exhibition with some of the most exemplary projects of the last few years – many of which had never been exhibited here previously. All the works were by renowned artists and in one way or another addressed Romania. Artists such as Harun Farocki, Simon Starling, Sean Snyder or Sandy Amerio grappled with Romania’s »difference«, deploying radically different means: from exploitation and analysis of a paradoxical local situation for the purposes of a broader line of argumentation to simply taking on an almost colonial attitude.
The second part of the exhibition was hosted in a spacious location, the romantic and kitsch-ridden former Palace of Culture, and showed on a small scale how a regional biennale with a global thrust might look.
Attila Tordai (the »local« voice within the curator group; Tordai is a curator, lives in Cluj and is on the editorial board of the newspaper »Idea«) devised a section that surprisingly – or perhaps not so surprisingly – demonstrated the fewest connections with the immediate context of Iasi or Romania. »Why Children?« gave an unexpectedly poetic overview of the conditions shaping parental life in the light of the current social and economic circumstances in a world where artists increasingly tackle questions such as growing precarity, racism and commodification. Taken together, the works by artists such as Nedko Solakov, Ciprian Muresan, Big Hope or Elke Marhofer depicted a loose yet comprehensive vision of how their respective societies educate/integrate/shape upcoming generations. Putting these small fragments together, one can say with a clear conscience that Periferic was much more than just a biennale on a particular topic: it was a polyphonic statement about biennales and the themes they could/should address if …
Translated by Helen Ferguson