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I visited Periferic 7 for two years ago and wrote a review, which was re-published in Idea magazine, where the organizers saw it. There is also an international advisory board- Marius Babias, Vasif Kortun, Anders Kreuger, Maria Lind- which suggests people and then the artistic director decides for the curator.

It was Matei Bejenaru, artistic director of the Biennial, artist
from Iasi, who started a performance festival in 1997, which organically developed to an international exhibition and since 2001 to an international contemporary art biennial.

Disadvantages and advantages can be almost identical: the context for contemporary art was missing in the beginning, which created the need to buil it. This work is still going on and gives opportunities to raise specific questions, different from places, where a well functioning institutional infrastructure, market and in good cases an ongoing discourse define the topics and issues to be discussed.

The idea was to concentrate on possible new local publics. The earlier two biennials gained international recognition and I was challenged by the idea to bring Periferic closer to the local people. Contemporary art as a cross-discipline genre of culture can help Iasi to define its contemporary cultural identity.

Gift giving is regarded as a non-market based exchange between people, which is not so positive as it seems at the first sight. Anthropologist Marcel Mauss described in the 1930’s the practice of potlach in the gift giving practices of Northwest Pacific coast Indian people. The receiver of the gift was obliged to give the gift back and the gift-giver at the same time gained prestige. So is it in art as well, it is not obvious who gains prestige and taking the audience in consideration, the generosity of the sender- the artist- is not always clear. It is not sure, if the message reaches the addressee at all.

My aim was to show the complexity of the concept art as gift. The idea was that the first reading is positive and even populistic, inviting for a non expert audience. When we look closer, it offers many layers for interpretation for insiders as well. For me the most interesting aspect was to create a self-reflective tool, which shows for new and old (experienced) public how the art world functions. This in form of an educative and maybe didactic exhibition, which still invites to enjoy objects and space.

Some reference artists were quite obvious in this regard. Felix Gonzales Torres, as his work also shows the complexity of the gift gesture: while we take from the candies (we present Untitled / For a Man in Uniform, 1991, Bard College – Marielouise Hessel Collection ) we consume the work, but also make it disappear. Another aspect of the concept to look at art as a potential intellectual tool was defined in Joseph Beuys’s kunst=kapital formula which he used often in his lectures and distributed in multiple format. The show consists of newly commissioned works and reference works, in this case we selected specific artworks or projects.

1 Art and its economies, meaning the functional mechanisms of the art world. In this connection we presented works from the 1970s by Mladen Stilinovic (Zagreb) and Rasa Todosijevic (Belgrade) and more recent works, as Cristian Jankowski’s “educational’ film Strategies for self-presentation in the art world” from 2002 and Crime against art, a film by curator Hila Peleg, which documents a staged trial initiated by Anton Vidokle and Tirdad Zolghadr at 2007 Madrid ARCO, where the two intitators accused themselves with abusing the art world with their activity.

2 Gift economies, here an early reference is the action Unguraded Money connected to Hungarian neo-avantgarde artist Miklos Erdely, who with some friends made a call in the streets of Budapest in the days of the 1956 Revolution to collect money in boxes placed at public places in Budapest for the families of the victims. We also presented a local social cultural project, Cartier, where for three years in a Iasi neighborhood different activies for the local community were realized.

3 performance and peformativity, as direct forms connecting to the public and interacting with it. French curator Guillaume Dèsanges worked with local school children and they re-enacted famous performances- the documentation of this one week workshop was presented in the show. Yuri Leiderman realised one of his Geopotics, tableux vivants, in which seemingly two far way cultural topoi are shown in one image and Dora Garcia’s book installation based on the mental exchange of common cultural references.

Periferic is very local, it is connected to Iasi. It always uses specific locations, this time the Sportshall of the Art University, which we transformed to an exhibition space and a temporary theatre building, a big minimalistic cube. Beside that an info point was created by Markus Bader, raumlabor Berlin, an architectural unit in form of a 5 x4 metres big public balcony, where one can step up on to oversized stairs, which hosts film screenings and other programs. On the other hand the Creative Mediation Project, which existed on different levels, for students, specialists and for highschool pupils was a crucial part of the project.