the spectral institution

Presenting the Spectral Institutions (so far)

The Blind Museum (Veda Popovici)
The Blind Museum, established in 2010 in Romania, is an autonomous institution with the aim of negotiating the lacks in history based on the museum's authority. Claiming itself form the particularities of 20th century art system, BM doesn’t have any models to forward. It exists even though it doen’t yet shelter or exhibit works of art. The museum it is in search of both a premises and a gaze which to teach. Initiator of the Spectral Institution project.

Kunstahlle Batistei
Kunstahlle Batistei is an institution dedicated to the production, exhibition and regulation of contemporary art. KB has functioned in the framework of ParadisGaraj, the literal garage and the physical premises of several institutions. Completely dependent financially and administratively of PG, KB has stopped functioning in August 2010 and is today just the specter of the institution it once was. Beyond nostalgia, KB still supports the sustainability of autonomous entities authority.


PARApolice (Arnold Schlachter)
The PARApolice gathers under the same institutional roof all the private security agencies in Bucharest. As a parallel security structure, PARApolice is an independent network of mutual support of its members. Once designating the most feared oppressive institutions, Security today refers to, thanks to the PARApolice, a very real promise of Bucharest public space.

The Bureau of Melodramatic Research (Alina Popa & Irina Gheorghe)
The Bureau of Melodramatic Research is a dependent institution established in 2009, with its main strategic goal is to raise the veil laid over melodrama in different social contexts and ensure public free access to the results of the research. BMR examines the way in which emotions, as key elements of melodrama across its historical development, are currently used and manipulated in the public sphere, whose handkerchiefs hide the tears shed in the course of the contemporary sentimental outburst.

CAA/CAA (Contemporary Art Archive/Center for Art Analysis), Lia Perjovschi
The CAA is a contemporary art museum in files focusing on art and its context,
art theory and practice, cultural studies and critical theory. A comprehensive (international) database “a voice-activated” capsule of knowledge. A frame and platform for ideas, dialogue, communication and empowerment focusing on issues that reflect the current debate in the art field and new cultural theories — about the social and political relevance of art, its autonomy and its changes. Under different names, the CAA has been active since 1985 in Lia and Dan Perjovschi’s home in Oradea, in the frame of the experimental studio at Art Academy Bucharest, in Lia and Dan Perjovschi’s artist studio in Bucharest, in national and international museums, galleries, non-profit or artist-run spaces and in the mass media. CAA has been initiated and is maintained by Lia Perjovschi with the help of Dan Perjovschi and supported by various people, institutions and NGOs from all over the world. CAA is currently working with an investigative method, searching for sense, hidden and lost ideas, relevant works and authors - normalcy as exception - and preserving a dizzydent (from dizzy) critical attitude in a context of consumerism and intellectual
stagnation.

The Presidential Candidacy
The Presidential Candidacy is a real and authentic political campaign with a performative attitude. It questions contemporary frames of art, producing a different, liminal artistic practice that superimposes art with activism, criticizing them both. The focuses on the exposure of ideologies, proposing an analysis of the power of the spectacle and the spectacle of power.

The Department of Art in Public Space (E-cart.ro)
The Department is dedicated to the research and facilitation of the production of art in public space. It aims to encourage the debate on public space in Romania. The Department is meant to be a long term structure which would produce this kind of projects, essential to the change of paradigm in social dialogue an public art in Romania.

The Museum of Modest Art of the Apartment – MAMA (Luiza Alecsandru)
MAMA is a museum set up in an apartment situates on the Hristo Botev street, in Bucharest. The object overcrowded space is redefined in a museum, reevaluating these domestic objects. (Re)building a personal history, the institution is an apparently modest possibility of reconfiguring immediate reality. Paradoxically, this reality, once institutionalized is made familiar with a potentially museographic public.