Land of Fire

18 October 2024 – 2 February 2025

Curator Cosmin Costinaș
Co-curators Mona Vătămanu and Florin Tudor

Artists: Claudia Andujar,  Florin Bobu, Alex Bodea, Tony Chakar,  Ana Deji,  Megan Dominescu,  Mihaela Drăgan, Ion Dumitrescu, Chitra Ganesh, Alexandra Gulea,  Loredana Ilie, Sakarin Krue-On, Ivana Mladenović, Nicoleta Moise, Silvia Moldovan, Elisabeta and Emilia Morar, Veda Popovici and Mircea Nicolae, Maria Prodan, Citra Sasmita, Ștefan Sava, Ultima Esperanza, Sana Shahmuradova Tanska, Robel Temesgen, Hans Mattis-Teusch, Mona Vătămanu and Florin Tudor, Mark Verlan, Cecilia Vicuña, Apichatpong Weerasethakul

1. Lands of Fire

In 1885—the year in which some European countries drew up a plan in Berlin to divide the African continent among themselves, ushering some of the bloodiest decades of genocides and land grabs around the world—a young man from an even younger country arrived in Argentina. Over the next few years, the Bucharest-born Iuliu Popper would become one of the most powerful conquerors and settlers of Tierra del Fuego archipelago at the tip of the South American continent, and a major perpetrator of the genocide against the Selk’nam people. Issuing his own currency and stamps from Tierra del Fuego, his ambitions were as grand as they were bloody and were only cut short by his untimely (and possibly orchestrated) death. Among these ideas was a pioneering and megalomaniacal plan for a colony in Antarctica, connected by a direct route to his stronghold in Tierra del Fuego, where he (re-)named mountains after the Romanian royal couple Carmen Sylva and Carol I and perhaps settled other Romanians. While the genocide of the Selk’nam, alongside their continuous survival and connection to their ancestral lands, was formally recognized by the Chilean Congress only last year, this atrocity and the central role played by a Romanian (a corresponding member of the Romanian Geographical Society, no less) in its execution are almost entirely unacknowledged in Romania. But this history is less hidden in Romanian culture and society than we might think and has run close to the surface of a very murky stream.

The main character of the 1954 novel Toate pînzele sus! (All sails up!) by Radu Tudoran, adapted to the much beloved 1977 TV series of the same name, essentially blends the figure of Iuliu Popper with that of the more benign Antarctic explorer Emil Racoviță. Popper has also made occasional appearances in the country’s public sphere throughout the years, as a Romanian adventurer of exceptional destiny, being issued, for example, commemorative stamps at the height of the communist era, with his portrait overlaid on a map of Tierra del Fuego (Racoviță was himself also honored with stamps). The Toate pînzele sus! TV series, which was part and parcel of several generations’ upbringing, portrays a celebratory vision of a Romanian expedition to Tierra del Fuego where the annihilationist racism towards the Indigenous people of the island is on full display, alongside the more familiar and close-to- home racism towards the perpetually-othered Jean Constantin, playing the role of Ismail, the stereotyped Turkish cook of the expedition. And yet, this series and its widespread success among Romanians of all ages should also be seen in the context of the time, as an opportunity for escapism in the imagination of a country whose citizens could rarely travel abroad, and almost never to places so far away. The exotic projections in the series (if not the blatant racism) was thus less the expression of privilege of a people for whom the world was their oyster, and more the dreams of crossing shuttered borders around a country that was becoming more and more homogenous and bleak.

Perhaps as a coincidence, Radu Tudoran’s more illustrious brother Geo Bogza, in his 1939 Lands of Stone, Fire, Earth book of reportage from different regions of Royal Greater Romania, describes in scorching tones in the “Land of Fire” chapter another Romanian colonial project, that of Cadrilater. The unstable regime of control and settler colonialism, directed by the Romanian state in this region of Bulgaria between 1913 and 1940, met with fierce local resistance, and has been in many ways a precursor to the deadliest Romanian colonial project, the occupation of Transnistria and the genocide of Jews and Roma in 1941–1944.

But Romanians’ and the territory of today’s Romania’s participation in, adjacency to, and benefit from the European project has a longer history. More anecdotally perhaps, the first written account of the first European expedition around the world, that of Magellan, was published by Maximilianus Transylvanus in 1523, which incidentally is also the first account of Tierra del Fuego, named after the fires lit by the Selk’nam and spotted by the expedition while crossing between the island and the South American continent towards the Pacific Ocean. In the seventeenth century, Nicolae Milescu Spătarul (of chopped nose fame) published an account of his travels to China. Around the same time as Popper, at the end of the nineteenth century, in the age of accelerated European conquest of the world, Transylvanian-born Hungarian scientific explorers Sámuel Fenichel and Lajos Bíró both travelled separately to Papua New Guinea, naming and categorizing local species. Simultaneously, Romanian aristocrats Dimitrie and his son Nicolae Ghica-Comănești embarked to Somalia and Ethiopia (Nicolae later to Alaska), trophy hunting, fame searching, as well as doing their own naming and categorizing in the name of science. It is important to note here that the European profession of the scientist played a crucial role in the colonial project, both through direct research used for the extraction of resources and through the imposition of epistemic frames, which led to the erasure of multiple local systems of knowledge. One can also argue that even when it wasn’t serving any specific project of plunder, or when it was not interfering with Indigenous worlds, the pure scientific explorer (like Racoviță) was driven by ambition and hubris that were ultimately of the same stock as the colonial ethos.

But are all these a mere collection of exceptions, of a few curiosities and accidental mass murders amongst a nation of mostly inward-looking peasants, who tended to identify more with Indigenous peoples and who constructed for themselves a history around resisting imperial oppression? Notwithstanding the role that precisely this fictional self-image—with its accumulated array of resentments—played in the formation of ideologies behind the genocides of the twentieth century, could a more accurate view of Romanian history incorporate its founding processes of settlement? The long-dominant yet largely fictional theory of Romanians’ continuity in the current territory of the country from the Roman Empire until today is increasingly challenged by the evidence that was otherwise always available. Could its replacement, the narrative of Romanian migration from the Balkans around a millennium ago, first to Transylvania and then, through a foundational settlement (descălecat) to Muntenia and Moldova, and a discreet yet continuous eastwards settlement in today’s Transnistria and Ukraine in the subsequent centuries, be placed in a historical line of colonialism with the episodes mentioned above? A history acknowledging colonialism seems appropriate for territories that enslaved at times the largest number of people on the European continent itself. The first written record of Roma enslavement in the Romanian lands from 1385 is only a few decades younger than any evidence of Romanian state structures and 150 years older than any written record of the Romanian language. Roma enslavement lasted at least half a millennium in today’s Romania.

2. Afară

On 30 June 1936, Haile Selassie, the last Emperor of Ethiopia—a country, which after a long and valiant resistance as the last unconquered territory by Europeans on the African continent, had just fallen to the Italian fascist armies—came to the League of Nations in Geneva to deliver a speech that would go down in history as a manifesto of anti-colonial resistance. As he was preparing to speak, a group of Italian journalists in the League’s hall began to heckle him loudly and obscenely. Maintaining the solemn composure of his august figure—which has also become part of twentieth century mythology, taken up by movements reaffirming African dignity, but also revered by Rastafarian religious groups formed around his aura on the other side of the Atlantic—the Italian fascists were admonished, however, by the president of the meeting, the Romanian diplomat Nicolae Titulescu. Rising from his chair, he shouted ‘à la porte, les sauvages!’ (afară, barbarilor!/out with the barbarians!) to the fascists, a moment that went down in the history of the League and that of Ethiopia (and led to Titulescu’s marginalization in the pro-fascist Romanian context of the time). The episode came to be depicted by the important Ethiopian modernist artist Agegnehu Engida on the vault of Addis Ababa’s Holy Trinity Cathedral, the seat of the country’s Orthodox church, built after liberation from Italian occupation. This emblematic moment, less illustrious in Romanian history, has nevertheless entered Ethiopia’s self-imagination, narrated in a hybrid visual language bringing together the tradition of Ethiopian religious painting and the idiosyncratic modernist vocabulary of Agegnehu Engida, who oscillated between abstraction, realism, and surrealism.

But what can we say about Romania’s self-imagination? In what visual languages is it narrated? Starting from the historical moment above, which has at its center a phrase of exclusion that is, however, precisely a proclamation against historical exclusions, as well as from its most famous immortalization in an Orthodox mural, this exhibition is interested in some lines of exclusion in both historical discourses in Romania and art history in the Romanian space. Which groups, along with their stories, images, and perspectives, have been excluded from Romania’s ongoing process of self-imagination? Furthermore, pointing out to the entanglements laid out in this text, which narratives showing the dark undercurrents of Romanian history continue to be ignored? And which artistic languages have been left out of the construction of an art history that reflects this self-image of the nation thus produced?

The various lines of progressive ideas and positions that marked Romania’s inter-war and pre-war history are usually relegated to a secondary position in relation to the dominant narratives about those periods. Not unrelatedly, entire social groups are left outside or on the ambiguous margins of the nation’s self-image. While this process is painfully evident in the case of minority ethnic communities in Romania, analogous processes are also occurring with respect to other social groups, such as miners. Miners played key roles in several important moments in the country’s history: the Lupeni strike of 1929, one of the biggest challenges from the left to Romania’s inter-war order and a foundational event for the communist era and its early socialist realist canon; the Valea Jiului strike of 1977, one of the biggest challenges to Romania’s communist regime, more significant than the opposition posed by the intellectual dissidence; the miners’ strikes and violent riots of the 1990s, the biggest challenges to post-communist Romania and foundational events for its social discourses of exclusion; and last but not least, the miners as absent and spectral figures in the Roșia Montană protests that marked the last decade in Romania and the new political positionings of its middle classes. Not to mention the absent and spectral figure of the miner throughout the former mining regions transformed in departure zones for mass migration. In all of these moments, the figure of the miner has been manipulated, forgotten, or demonized, as well as externalized from the body of the nation. In parallel, however, a massive visual production of representations of the miners, as a social group, as an abstraction, or as a metaphor, under constant change and viewed through most different perspectives has taken place, as a miniature version of the history of modern and contemporary Romanian art.

Alongside the stories mentioned above, the exhibition speaks to the ways in which not only subjects but also genres, styles, languages, media, and artistic genealogies have been left out of dominant narratives, often at the expense of complexity. Another history always seems to have run beneath the thin surface of that murky stream of what we recognize. What can we learn by dipping our toes in, even a little? What can we learn, for example, if we look more closely at the history of Romanian Orthodox vernacular painting about eighteenth and nineteenth century female artists in Transylvania (such as Elisabeta and Emilia Morar, Maria Prodan, or Ana Deji) who, in their rural workshops, contributed significantly to the development of this artistic language at a time when women were largely excluded from the practice of visual arts throughout Europe? Or if we look at the history of fifteenth–seventeenth century Islamic carpet collecting in Transylvania as part of complex commercial and cultural links with the Islamic space, which later came to be represented in paintings of the seventeenth century Dutch Golden Age, reflecting the new wealth gained from the colonies, whose benefits extended all the way to the Romanian territories? We will likely see new chapters opening up both within the Romanian space and beyond, in a world that is becoming wider, for better or worse, than what our stories about ourselves tend to tell. Because the first part of Titulescu’s phrase, in Romanian afară (outside), contains ambiguity when uttered in the Romanian context, as a call for exclusion, oftentimes violent, but also as an evocation of a diffuse psychogeography, usually more desirable than the Romanian insides.

3. Civilization and Barbarism
The last part of Titulescu’s phrase, on the other hand, points out to a damned pair that haunts all these streams, two words that have meant so little and yet so much was imagined and carried out with them in mind: civilization and barbarism. Throughout recent centuries and different continents, they’ve served vastly different arguments and visions of the world. What connects, for example, Senegalese Cheikh Anta Diop’s monumental Civilization or Barbarism, which reclaims a history of thinking and building on the African continent from the epistemic frames of colonial ‘science’ with Benjamin Netanyahu’s genocidal vision of a struggle between ‘civilization’ and ‘barbarism’ in Palestine?

When Iuliu Popper arrived in Argentina, the cultural and political milieu there was deeply shaped by Domingo Faustino Sarmiento’s 1845 Facundo: Civilization and Barbarism book. Hugely influential throughout the continent, whose author was to become an Argentinian president, it imagines Latin American societies, particularly those in the Southern Cone, as being torn by an existential struggle between the civilizational forces of Europe and its urban descendants under the equator on one side and the barbaric forces of chaos on the other. In a somewhat bitter irony for Sarmiento, the latter include both the gauchos, the farmers/settlers/genocidaires of the south (of which Popper would become an emblem), as well as the Indigenous worlds ravished by the gauchos. But Popper came from a country where this pair of concepts has also been at the core of obsessive conversations that have shaped its own historical development. From the beginning of the modern era, Romania saw itself as being in a constant process of attaining to an ideal of civilization that was defined through a selective projection of different ideas about Europe. This strive for civilization has been in constant need to produce its twin, so the barbaric has always been there, in different communities being othered as well as deep within itself, a self that was never good enough. These processes of collective insecurity and self-colonization are not unique to Romania however. Thailand, a country that prides itself of not having been colonized by European powers, has also gone through processes that could be seen as forms of self-colonization, with the Thai word siwilai having meant in the past century and a half as many things for as many people in the country’s diverse social landscape, from genres of music and particular dishes to democracy, from clothing to fascism. But these processes of self-colonization in Thailand were in many ways also processes of internal colonization, of constantly-produced others, from ethnic minorities to social classes, replicating the model of a European colony within its own territory. This latter aspect again reminds us of Romania.

So what happens when colonialism becomes aspirational, a Western practice to be emulated by countries that don’t see themselves as ‘civilized’ either? How to distinguish the two evil twins playing tricks and changing hats, when figures like Popper committed the cruelest acts of barbarism in the name of a civilization he so often invoked in his writings? When ‘civilized countries’ remains in Romanian common parlance, an unironic definition for parts of afară, the outside world? We should perhaps insist on seeing barbarism in the only place its utterance is justified, as in Titulescu’s declamation, towards the fascists, barbarians who are increasingly showing their ugly heads again.

Cosmin Costinaș is the Senior Curator of Exhibition Practices at the Haus der Kulturen der Welt, HKW, Berlin (since 2022). He was co-Artistic Director of the 24th Biennale of Sydney (2024); Director of Para Site, Hong Kong (2011–22); Artistic Director of Kathmandu Triennale 2077 (2022); co-curator of the Romanian Pavilion at the 59th Venice Biennale (2022); Curatorial Adviser of the Aichi Triennale (2022); Curator of Dakar Biennale 2018 – La Biennale de l’Art africain contemporain-DAK’ART (2018); Guest Curator at the Dhaka Art Summit (2018); Co-curator of the 10th Shanghai Biennale (2014); Curator of BAK – basis voor actuele kunst, Utrecht (2008–11); Co-curator of the 1st Ural Industrial Biennial, Ekaterinburg (2010); and Editor of documenta 12 magazines, Vienna/Kassel (2005–07), among others. He has edited and contributed his writing to numerous books, magazines, and exhibition catalogues and has taught and lectured at different universities, art academies, and institutions across the world.

Mona Vătămanu and Florin Tudor address the theme of history in films, installations, paintings and performative actions that revisit ideologies, utopias, and modernist projects. Their work has been shown in Kadist San Francisco, 2024; Diriyah Biennial, 2024; 5th Kyiv Biennial, Vienna, 2023; Kathmandu Triennale, 2022; 10th Shanghai Biennale, 2014; 12th Istanbul Biennial, 2011; 5th Berlin Biennial, 2008.

The exhibition “Land of Fire” is an event organised by Fundația Calina, produced by Kunsthalle Bega and co-financed by the Ministry of Culture through the Center for Projects and co-financed by the Administration of the National Cultural Fund.

Kunsthalle Bega is an alternative and experimental space founded in Timisoara in 2019, where contemporary art is thought, discussed and exhibited. Dedicated especially to young artists from Romania and the world, Kunsthalle Bega is aesthetically and socially interested in the platforms of contemporary art museums. Every year, following consultations with a specialised jury, it offers an award—the Bega Art Prize—to a Romanian curator under the age of 40 who has managed to change the rules of curatorial perception. Involved in educational projects with diverse communities, Kunsthalle Bega promotes the significant importance of art publications. Kunsthalle Bega is a project of Calina Foundation initiated by Alina Cristescu, Liviana Dan and Bogdan Rața, together with Andreea Drăghicescu and Ugron Lajos.

“Land of Fire” is part of the national cultural program “Timisoara – European Capital of Culture in 2023” and is funded by the Legacy Timisoara 2023 creative program, developed by @Centrul de Proiecte Timisoara, with funds allocated from the state budget, through the budget of the @Ministerul Culturii. The cultural program does not necessarily represent the position of the Timisoara City Hall and the Timisoara Local Council. The content of the cultural program and how its results can be used are the sole responsibility of the authors and the beneficiary of the funding. Timisoara City Hall and Timișoara Local Council are not responsible for the content of the material and how it could be used.

Project co-financed by the @Administratia Fondului Cultural National. The project does not necessarily represent the position of the AFCN. AFCN is not responsible for the content of the project or how the project results can be used. These are entirely the responsibility of the beneficiary of the funding.

Institutional Partners: Muzeul Național de Artă a României, Muzeul Național Secuiesc, Muzeul de Artă – Muzeul Județean Mureș, Muzeul Judeţean de Artă «Centrul Artistic Baia Mare», Muzeul Municipiului București, Academia de Stude Economice, Administrația Națională a Penitenciarelor, Penitenciarul Ploiești, Ambasada României în Republica Federală Democratică Etiopia

Parteneri: Samdani Art Foundation, Facultatea de Arte și Design – Universitatea de Vest din Timișoara, Kerber Verlag, Fundația Herczeg, PUNCH, Storm Sped, Agape

Media Partners: Radio România Cultural, Revista ARTA, Zeppelin, Observator cultural, Modernism.ro, Propagarta, Contemporary Art, Renașterea Bănățeană, Agenția de Carte.ro

Sponsori: BEGA, PINTeam, VendTeam, Egeria, ELECS Group