Public space
Ant-bear Baraka
Project description
Located in front of The National Museum of Art from Timisoara having the same vibe of famous museums of the world, Furnicarul Baraka becomes the ambassador of art which can easily attracts attention of what is going on behind the museum walls through its monumentality and expression, without fear or missed interpretations. The unknown takes shape and becomes accessible to us and the characters are like coming from the future and they are watching us with their endless eyes trying to invite us to look at them closely without fear. Through Braka’s entity which represents a pure form of art Baraka Artist presents through an honest and real act a part of his identity with the goal of taking away of the personal self influenced of society’s deficiencies. Also with this spontaneous gesture Baraka Artist comes in the public space and tries to present a statement of the real art world’s situation with all the dysfunctions about price and value. The whole act is transformed in a celebration of the artistic spirit.
Author's presentation text
Baraka is an contemporary artistic colony, whose object based practice is both visceraland thought-provoking. Creating hyper-realist sculptures representing subjects deemed to beshocking and immoral within a certain value system, Baraka’s development is both iconoclasticand iconophile, bringing to surface the banality of evil with sarcasm and tender playfulness.They are graduates of the Arts and Design School of the West University of Timisoara.This entity was set up in the summer of 2012 as an alternative artist-run space, where themembers could develop their own projects within the institutional context represented by the ArtSchool.Baraka’s statement refers to the development of collective artistic projects that are opento collaboration with other invited artists and facilitates research into common areas of interest.Concerned with issues pertaining to the organic-inorganic and with BioArt experiments,showcasing their works in their own manner established over time, Baraka’s targets are studiesof sexual, religious and political identity in a social context. They consist of the artistic discourseaccompanying a visual dialogue based on the contrast between corporeality and the externalenvironment, the relations between hard and soft, internal and external, expression andperception.Baraka represents a unique formula on the Romania’s contemporary art scene. Everywork is developed by the group concept. The Baraka artist-run space came like an alternative ofthe Institution. The main concept of finding a place for a studio was to create a healthy contextfor a natural creative development without any compromise. Over time things went in a directionwhere Baraka the artist-run space became an organised place which now has three mainfunctions: a place for a big studio, a place as a small gallery (where they can put showstogether) and a place for discussions and dialogues.
