Avantpost

Avantpost
2 Revoluției Blvd. (The central space of the Post Office)
Opening hours: Wed-Sun, 13:00 – 19:00 (05/19 – 07/16/2023)

Avantpost
Hector Street (Bastion Corner Space)
Opening hours: Wed-Sun, 13:00 – 19:00 (05/19 – 07/08/2023)

Title: Hiperestezia 

Artists: Aura Bălănescu, Ciprian Chirileanu, Marius Jurca, Livia Mateiaș, Liliana Mercioiu Popa, Sorin Oncu, Renée Renard, Petrică Ștefan, Daniel Tellman, Bogdan Tomșa, Miki Velciov. Curator: Maria Orosan-Telea

The Hyperesthesia project harnesses the artistic research of the Avantpost group that has often been based on transdisciplinarity, on the use of technology and on the exploration of spatial possibilities in relation to perception and synesthesia. Avantpost artists have been exhibiting together since 2014 using mostly alternative spaces as a starting point for site-specific installations.

The Hyperesthesia exhibition imagines an intersection between exploring the world through the senses and discovering the world through art and technology. Starting from the etymology of the term (gr. hyper=high, aisthesis=sense/sensation), which refers to the exaggerated receptivity to external stimuli, the title of the exhibition suggests the relation mediated by the senses between our body and the environment. Artistic proposals will explore these types of relationships, imagining objects and situations that extend sensory functions with the help of new technologies or that use these capabilities as a generative source for new artistic expressions. Senses enhanced by “extensive prostheses” (Eco, 1997), or senses that help to access knowledge accumulated through what Abraham Wolf called “technical arts” (Wolf, 1935).

As long as the surface of the human body is in its entirety an instrument of tactile perception, in the paradigm of an aesthetics of tactility, it could represent the key point of the artistic research exhibited in the show. Starting from here, however, a multitude of correlations and interdependencies are generated, ways through which the sense of touch can be related to biological or technological, natural or artificial, emotional or rational, tangible or immaterial, structured or unstructured, static or mobile.