Artist Talks

The Regional Francophone Center for Advanced Research in Social Sciences (CEREFREA Villa Noël) and P+4 Association are delighted to invite you to meet the resident-artists Nicole Hewitt (Croatia), Sonja Jankov (Serbia) and Romana Schmalisch (Germany) and their projects developed as part of the artistic research residency CEREFREA Villa Noël 2016. The event features short artist talks and the presentation of the preliminary results of their research stay in Bucharest. The projects Minor Speculations by Nicole Hewitt, Mythological Drawings of Residential Brutalism in Bucharest by Sonja Jankov, Mobile Cinema – A View into Space by Romana Schmalisch, and are on view between 01 and 10 September, every day from 11.00 till 18.00.

During the months of July and August at Villa Noël, the three artists have explored a host of subjects inspired by the Bucharest architectural and urban context, by the Neolithic archaeological sites from Romania and the illustrations of the journal Science-Fiction Stories Collection, by the debates aroused from the encounters between film theory, astrophysics and astronomy. 

By examining the gaps/interferences between archaeological data, their interpretations, and the production of fictionality (Nicole Hewitt), the complex associations between architectural image and urban vegetal environment on the basis of abstract observation (Sonja Jankov) and between different concepts of a cosmic cinema and scientific knowledge in terms of a thought experiment (Romana Schmalisch), the three resident-artists seek in their fragmented narratives to connect visual thinking with a more analytical view on the historical account, repositioning the way of looking at things, their relation and the quotidian. 

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The Residency Program CEREFREA Villa Noël is open to artists from Central and Southeastern Europe. The program’s aim is to set up regional networks in the sphere of artistic research, strengthening the exchanges with connected cultural domains such as social sciences, humanities, architecture. 

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Nicole Hewitt (Croatia) is working in film, video art, installation and performance art. Hewitt completed her MA in Fine Art Media at the Slade School of Fine Art and gained her PhD in Fine Art at the same university. Her work has recently been concerned with memory, history and narrative mediated through technologies of representation and preservation. She is currently working on an episodic series of performances/texts entitled This woman is called Jasna. 

Hewitt is a lecturer and Head of Department of Animation and New Media of the Academy of Fine Arts, University of Zagreb since 2005, and was a visiting lecturer at Goldsmiths College, Visual Arts Department from 2009 till 2011, and the London Metropolitan University in 2014. She is living and working in Zagreb, Croatia and London, UK.

Sonja Jankov (Serbia) is an independent historian and theorist of contemporary art, interested in the cultural aspects of modern architecture, who uses photography and temporary spatial installations within interpretative curatorial practices. She holds an MA from the Faculty of Political Sciences (Department for Cultural Theory), Belgrade, and has spent a year at the Centre for Critical and Cultural Theory of Karlova University in Prague. She worked at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Novi Sad between 2012 and 2015, and was the gallery director at the Institute for Culture of Vojvodina (2014). She is contributor to B92 journal, the section for culture and art. Her publications include over 50 critiques and reviews, texts for catalogues and essays. She was a scholarship holder of the Republic Foundation for Development of Scientific and Artistic Youth, Serbia.

Romana Schmalisch (Germany) studied Fine Arts at the University of Arts in Berlin where she graduated with an MFA in 2002. She was a resident artist in several fellowship programs, among others as researcher at the Fine Art Department of the Jan Van Eyck Academy, Maastricht, in the Berlin Senate’s fellowship program in collaboration with Whitechapel Gallery and Studio Voltaire, London, and in Les Laboratoires d’Aubervilliers, Paris. In 2009 the artist started her long-term project Mobile Cinema, an apparatus somewhere between urban model, cinema, and plate camera that unites experimental lecturing and moving to different places. Romana Schmalisch developed different film projects at the interface of theory and film, investigating cinematic representations and the representation of historical processes and social structures and works, and collaborated on various film projects with Robert Schlicht.

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The program is conceived and organized by: CEREFREA Villa Noël, Université de Bucarest et P+4 Association

With the support of:  Agence universitaire de la Francophonie (AUF), Goethe-Institut 

Sponsors: Domeniul Coroanei Segarcea, Carrefour Colentina

Media Partners: Revista Arta, Igloo, Romania pozitivă, Zeppelin, Observatorul Cultural

Project co-financed by the The Administration of the National Cultural Fund.

The project does not necessarily represent the official position of the Administration of the National Cultural Fund. AFCN shall not be held liable for the project’s content or any use to which the project outcome might be put. These are the sole responsibility of the beneficiary of the funding.