About

IP — The Institute of the Present is a research and an artist resource platform in the field of visual and performing culture. Centred on artists and their personal accounts, time-specific encounters and means of (self-)archiving, the Institute looks at various practices and situations from the recent past until today from a transnational and transcultural perspective.

Aiming to record artistic facts, events, objects and situations that have defined the history of visual and performing arts in Romania starting from the late 1960s until today, IP has adopted a systematic, though non-linear, approach. The Institute aspires to shift the reading perspective of the artists’ visual and performing vocabulary from within the context that generated it, in order to bring to the foreground the production practices, the transnational relations and the accounts that have been suppressed or have remained invisible.

Through its projects — subjective exercises in exposing and opening the artistic laboratory —, the Institute of the Present supports the access of the new generation of artists and producers in the field of contemporary culture, as well as of the interested public, to significant knowledge resources, to the unmediated contact with leading personalities and landmark moments of the Romanian and international art scene.

The Institute’s main lines of activity include: the artist resource platform institutulprezentului.ro open to the professionals and to the general public alike; an educational programme centered on (self-)pedagogic practices and artistic concepts; a research programme dedicated to the imaginative, subjective and historical connections present in the artistic process and its accompanying theoretical discourse, as well as to the mobility of concepts and theories. The working formats include research projects, laboratories and conferences, specialised exhibitions, reenactments, editing of printed and online publications.

Launched in Bucharest in 2017 by Ștefania Ferchedău and Alina Șerban, the Institute of the Present brings together visual and performing culture professionals who share the same vision and references and the same interest in research, striving to achieve a structured, imaginative and participatory exchange between the various artistic disciplines and communities.

institutulprezentului.ro

The online platform is an open space for transnational and cross-disciplinary exchanges focused on art (in the broader sense of the term) and on its immediate context, which sets out to debate, through its proposed sections, a range of issues pertaining to the research and analysis methodologies in social sciences and the humanities. The editors are interested in the interferences between art and related fields such as literature and architecture; in promoting a new type of cultural journalism which combines literary writing and the theoretical essay with a research methodology conducted academically; in facilitating access to the artistic laboratory and personal archives.

institutulprezentului.ro sums up a need to Record, Learn and Transfer raw artistic materials, visual theories and methodologies, paying attention to the artistic intention as part of a fluid approach and discussing not only the Reality of an artwork (its geographical and historical circumstances), but also its Poetics, as an emotional response to the encoding and decoding of biographies, spatial situations and lived events.

The platform institutulprezentului.ro as an archive of artist and theoretical resources, of oral documents and histories, is structured like an open novel in four chapters — Reportages, Scripts, Trips and Study — placing Reality and Poetics side by side.

IMPRESSUM

Institute of the Present
ISSN 2783–9974
ISSN–L 2783–9974

Editors: Alina Șerban, Ștefania Ferchedău
Design: Radu Manelici
Communication design: Sebastian Pren, Andrei Turenici
Web development: Vlad Nastasiu
Image processing: Serioja Bocsok
Camera and video editing: Andreea Lăcătuș, Dan Iordache
Sound Editor: Mara Mărăcinescu
Translation: Claudia Lie, Laura Ionică
Proofreading of Romanian version: Cristina Ștefan, Alina-Nicoleta Ioan
Proofreading of English version: Emmet Cooke, Diana Bularca
Contact: ip@institutulprezentului.ro

Copyright: All materials published have been exclusively written for the platform institutulprezentului.ro with the agreement of all copyright holders. The authors’ rights and other intellectual property rights regarding the editorial format, texts, photographs and illustrations on this website rest with IP and the respective copyright holders.

Cultural project co-funded by the Administration of the National Cultural Fund.

The project does not necessarily represent the standpoint of the Administration of the National Cultural Fund. AFCN cannot be held liable for the content of the project or the manner in which the outcomes of the project may be used. These shall devolve entirely on the beneficiary of the financing.
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Cultural project included in the TM2023 RESTART priority cultural programme of the Centre for Projects of Timișoara Municipality, undertaken with the support of Timișoara Municipality and of Timișoara Local Council.

The cultural project does not necessarily represent the standpoint of Timișoara Municipality and of Timișoara Local Council. The content of the cultural project and the way in which its results may be used represent the exclusive responsibility of its authors and of the beneficiary of the funding. Timișoara Municipality and Timișoara Local Council cannot be held liable for the content of the project or the manner in which this may be used.
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Cultural project funded in 2017 in the frame of the cultural program Bucharest Participative City by the Bucharest Municipality and the Cultural Centre of the Bucharest Municipality.