Authors’ Comment
Art Safari 2016. The year of Dada. May. An ark lost in time opens its belly to host Bucharest`s art thirsty minds. The gallery`s temporary home, the Dacia-Romania Palace is born in 1880, inside Bucharest`s financial heart. Like a handful of runes thrown on the ground, its story unravels the submission of bourgeois prestige into a mosaic of functional, generic spaces, sliced in square meters. From the neoclassical facades and its public foyer, dominated by baroque soffits, reminiscent of a Viennese hotel, to its mechanically celled-up rooms into work cubicles, the Palace is a collection of conflicts.
Designed for financial calculus, the Palace used to be a bank office and a haven for accountants confined inside cramped closets filled with bulky files. Once possessed by rigor, these cells are exorcised and set free through art, unveiling new perspectives for the city`s Old Center. Art Safari will not conceal Romanian transition`s broken mirror. Instead, it motherly embraces its dysfunctions, discrepancies and dissonances which still reverb inside the Palace today.
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