Elisions: Reckoning with History in The Romanian Pavilion at the 2019 Venice Biennale

The Romanian Pavilion at the Venice Biennale has been often marked by elisions and absences: some of them due to the isolationist political regime during the 1980s, others voluntarily staged and performed as a means of escaping from a dominant logic of cultural and political representation. The paper adresses two politically charged moments in the history of the Romanian participation at the Venice Biennale in recent decades: the 2005 European Influenza curated by Marius Babias, which tackled the issue of European integration and peripheral (self-)representations, and the 2019 Unfinished Conversations on the Weight of Absence curated by Cristian Nae. The 2019 Romanian Pavilion displayed reconfigured art installations, originally conceived in the 1980s and 1990s, which were often subjected to material or conceptual transformations in their own exhibition histories. These counter-monumental art installations expanded the geography of contemporary art constructed according to national categories, including the Romanian diaspora, while at the same time rejecting the understanding of the artistic object as a fixed art historical entity. In my paper, I suggest that these two exhibitions may be considered as alter-historiographic exercises meant to investigate how exhibitions may function as a counter-hegemonic art historical practice.