The Story of Kunsthaus 7B - Contemporary Arts in the Carpathian Mountains

 Photo: Cristian Draghici

 

In the years before COVID 19 the cultural tourism to Transylvania increased steadily. Main destinations had been the Church Fortresses and cities of Transylvanian Saxons as Brasov, Sighisoara and of course Sibiu, who had been European Cultural Capital 2007. Aside the public museums and their offers Kunsthaus 7B in Cisnadioara near Sibiu developed as a center for international contemporary art. It became an important factor in the cultural tourism to Transylvaina with increasing numbers of international exhibitions and visitors. Together with the Evanghelical Church Congregation of the German speaking minority in Transylvania, we transformed the old abandoned School House into an art-space. Surprisingly, the project did not start in one of the big cities with their urban culture, but in a village where values and traditions from the 13^th Century are sustaining unbroken.

How does it came to this project and why seems it to be necessary for Transylvania, Romania and Central-Europe?

My ancestors came from Transylvania, from the German speaking minority in the country between the Carpathian Mountains. I had been born in Germany, grew up in Germany and lived most of my life in Germany, not being so much aware of my roots on the Northern Balkan Peninsula.

In summer 1999 I had been first time in Romania. For me this journey had been very intensive, now I started to understand a lot about the structures and behaviors in our family and even in myself. Aside finding my roots, the trip caused new questions. The breath-taking landscape, the warmhearted politeness of the people, the awesome tasting food, all this had been a surprise for me. And then I asked myself, why people (now from Germany) go for holiday to North of Italy, in autumn for “Törgelen” to taste the new grape-juice and young wine? Why they are not coming to Transylvania?

After some years of travelling through Romania I remarked something particular: It seems to me that Romanian people don’t take culture for serious. They don’t take their own culture for serious. It seems to me, that the reason for that lack of believing in the own cultural productivity lies deeper in history, then in the years of communism. Of course, in times when intellectuals landed up in the Danube-Black Sea Channel, shoveling soil without any protection walls, then it is better no one is aware of the interest in sciences and culture. And on the other side, the officially declared intellectuals of Ceaucescu-Regime appeared helpless - they simply didn’t know how to be intellectual.

The countries along the river Danube are regions with enormous outstanding cultural skills as talents in music, literature, theater and visual arts. There is a long tradition of appreciating this. The Danube Area is one of the most creative areas in the world, evoking genius talents on almost all fields of cultural activities.

I decided to support contemporary-artists especially from Romania. I felt responsible for the people of my country and still I am convinced, that art from Central Europe should be placed again, where it belongs to, into the Center of Europe. Aside taking historical sites as castles and church-fortresses for serious, it is highest time that the Romanians taking their contemporary culture for serious. Art is transporting values and the culture of a land always describes the codes how people are behaving. Who is not caring about the contemporary culture of a country is not taking care, how its people are behaving.

Especially in Romania I found enormous skilled young artists, who preserved the values of the “homo europaeus” as Prof. Victor Neumann called him. The “homo europaeus”  is well educated, world-open, travelling, studying abroad, caring friendships all over the world, speaking several languages, empathic and blessed by a natural courtesy, understanding art in the meaning of enlightenment as something higher focusing the human being and the human reason.

This new generation of Romanian artists stayed abroad.  They know how life could be. They are free of suffering from communist or post-communist trauma, and they are free of the urge in coping western experimentalism. They believe in enlightenment and responsibility and creating a new, more refined time-less and space-less art. I think it is worth to support this artistic movement.

In 2017 I decided together with the Evanghelical Church Congregation of the German speaking minority to transform the old German speaking schoolhouse of the Transylvanian Saxons into an art-space, in order to create an exhibition space for Romanian and international artists. The idea is, that in Kunsthaus 7B as we called it, (the title of the project is a short version of the German word for Transylvania “Siebenbürgen”), artists from the Danube area and other regions of Europe are meeting with cultural interested people from all over the world, collectors, curators, journalists or just tourists appreciating art. With our global network of contacts in the art-world, that had been created through my activities as a collector, Kunsthaus 7B wants to be a stepping stone for artists from the Danube region to international careers. This project would not be possible without the support by the people from the village and the members of the Evanghelical Church Congregation in Cisnadioara.

The project is financially sustained by earnings from art-sales, contributions by the Church Congregation and me. Of course, the Corona caused travelling restrictions in 2020 creates a horrible financial situation for our artists and us. At this moment we are depending more and more on the philanthropic support of families, who support the idea of Kunsthaus 7B and who understand, that it is important for Transylvania, Romania and Central Europe that private cultural projects sustain this period. They are giving us hope and motivation to continue.

Oana Ionel Exhibition in Vienna - Something is going on in the East - Portrait about the artist

 

Photo Credit: Josefina Danzinger

The Oana Ionel exhibition “The Secret Stories of Danube River” in Vienna's Private Art Club “ART 9TEEN” is already one of the surprising and remarkable exhibitions in Austria's capital city this year.

The young Bucharest artist shows the Viennese audience that it is time to talk about our understanding of borders. "In times when we prefer to build walls rather than bridges, it becomes clear that we have to re-discuss our understanding of borders." One of the key concepts in Ionel's work is to understand borders as an invitation, to linger, to meet and communicate, to negotiate and trade and for mutual understanding. “The Danube ignores man-made boundaries, makes them permeable and metaphorical,” Ionel describes her point of view. This is hardly surprising, as her Central European homeland was for centuries the border between East and West, between the ancient Roman Empire and Byzantium, between the Enlightenment and Orthodoxy. This border goes through regions, landscapes, villages, streets, families and sometimes through individual people. But the doctorate artist and psychologist is interested in something else, namely to find out from our own limitations of fear, which guides us more than usual in politics and society today, from the limitation of analytical thinking, of “either or” towards infinitely creative "as well as".

Oana Ionel is fascinated by water, by the constant incessant process of becoming new, of coming and going, of washing up new territory and the invisible land, but becoming new again and again. For her, water is a living being with a memory spanning millions of years, older than that of the people on the river. Water always has the tendency to find its way back. The water of the Danube remembers Ada Kaleh, the Danube Island that sank in 1971. The island, which belongs to Romania, was evacuated in 1968 in a "night-and-fog operation". The Turkish originated population was promptly asked to leave the island. Then it remained empty for several years until it sank into the catchment basin of the Danube in 1971 when the Iron Gate 1 dam was built. Ada Kaleh with his fate became a symbol of diversity, living space and respect. "Above all, a lack of respect for life" adds Ionel. From the perspective of the young artist Ada Kaleh, the massive pressure with which the island was depopulated by the rulers of the time and then left empty for years makes a further example of the failure of a patriarchal society. “Men who are distant from life want to force others to have their own pathological reality”. You can tell that Ionel belongs to a generation that has lived abroad and knows what life can be like in a democracy and in a constitutional state. And this is also a generation that no longer puts up with everything.

The Bucharest artist Oana Ionel is socially committed herself. She organizes conferences or acts as a speaker when it comes to the coexistence of ethnic groups in the Danube countries. She is ready to take responsibility for her country and for Europe. Oana Ionel can't stand people doing nothing, like watching hypnotized situations and sleeping with their eyes open. “I always thought that it only exists here in Eastern Europe, that it has something to do with communism.” Now she has to realize that she was wrong. What scares her today is that she is observing doing nothing and watching or looking away more and more often in the West, in France, Germany, Austria, in many countries. “You see democracy as a consumer good that you like or not, that you zap or spit out at will. One does not realize that democracy is something that can be shaped, a process that one can get involved in. People are no longer aware of what they have achieved in democracy, in personal prosperity, in personal freedom. You risk too much and sacrifice it to populism that is alien to life ”.

Ionel used the lockdown in spring 2020 to reconsider. "I notice that I need another larger look, that I need larger formats in my work that deal with the really important things of our time, not to lose sight of the whole."

In her lockdown work “Stillness”, Oana Ionel portrayed the silence that captures us when we see a beach from above. In excerpts, but realizing that there is a greater whole. "The lockdown has thrown us back on ourselves, on our own insignificance but also on the confrontation with ourselves"

How can one express timeless meta-political social criticism other than in strong, timeless abstractions? Ionel has no answer to this, stays calm, abstraction is a universal language for her that everyone understands. You can feel the energy in her expressive work. It is a timeless, always there energy that charismatically embraces and ensnares the viewer, but leaves him the freedom of his own interpretation. In doing so, she manages the rare balance between her powerful, expressive brushstrokes and the strong colors, which lively, lively emulate the vortex of the river, but also symbolize the hustle and bustle in the cities along the Danube. At the same time, the work by no means seems light-footed and banal, but rather profound and serious. One stands in front of her works in different shades of blue and turquoise with the same emotion as one stands in front of the Danube itself. She repeatedly uses wax as a special element, which is mysteriously associated with the gold dust of Byzantine painting.

There is not much symbolism required in Oana Ionel's work, and it is not necessary to chase after artistic trends to attract attention. Oana Ionel leads the way. She is already a role model for many young women and artists, not only in Eastern Europe.