09.06.2009
Lectures/Events

The Zone Performance Festival between Border and Boundaries
Lecture with Ileana Pinitlie

The Zone Performance Festival between Borders and Boundaries Lecture with Ileana Pintilie

Tuesday, June 9, 2009, 7 p.m.

East Europe Zone, or Zone for short, was a performance art festival that took place several times in Timisoara (Romania) beginning in the early ‘90s. The festival presented art that replaced Communist propaganda art at the time the borders were opened in Eastern Europe, but which was already very active in the underground before 1990. From the very beginning Zone took on the task of doing justice to the cultural currents that went unnoticed by the official cultural institutions in Romania. Zone received great international attention because of its high level of artistic professionalism. The festival showed the great ongoing relevance of performance art and particularly typified the appropriateness of the human body as a central resource with which to communicate artistic, social, and political themes. The primary goal for Zone and its workshops was to establish a regional creative scene, which would also extend beyond the national borders and participate in Eastern European and international projects. Moreover, it supported Romania – probably one of the most isolated countries under Communism – in its quest for integration into the international scene.

Ileana Pintilie, curator of the East Europe Zone Festival, is an art historian and art critic. She has curated numerous shows in Europe and the US since the 1990s. She has been a curator at the Banat Museum in Timisoara since 1980 and is responsible for modern and contemporary art (1990-92 Head of Art Department). She is also a lecturer at the Faculty of Fine Arts at West University in Timisoara and author of the book Actionism in Romania during the Communist Era, published in 2000. In 1994 she was granted the Romanian National Award for Art Criticism.