Ioana Nemeș: All the Future Ahead
Ioana Nemeș
Kevin Space is pleased to present the first solo exhibition by Romanian conceptual artist Ioana Nemeș (1979–2011) in Austria. The exhibition unfolds around “Monthly Evaluations” (2005–2010), a major body of work consisting of a diagrammatic system of (self-)observations. Driven by the desire “to record, dissect, understand and describe intangible things such as life or time”, Nemeș developed a methodology of day-to-day assessments based on a distinct set of parameters (physical, emotional, intellectual, financial, and luck), coupling these daily charts with numerical systems, colour codes, and poetic text fragments. These evaluations have generated an archive of lived experience, a framework within which Nemeș has been able to operate, extracting particular days and giving them form as paintings, objects, or sculptures; pairing them as elliptically linked compositions and possible narratives; assessing the intersections between personal and historical psychological rhythms; and transforming abstract notions of time into palpable and affective forms.
Preceding the in-depth investigation of time in “Monthly Evaluations”, a significant period of research and exploration informed the artist’s methodology whose starting point can be traced back to the months Nemeș spent as artist-in-residence in Vienna in fall 2003. Besides a selection of days from “Monthly Evaluations” as well as works from series such as “Untitled,” “The Wall,” or “Self/interviews,” the exhibition therefore also includes several of such proto-evaluations in order to highlight both the complex process of shaping her artistic practice as well as traces of her encounters with the city of Vienna.
Curated with Kilobase Bucharest and Viktor Neumann. With the generous support of tranzit.at, the Romanian Cultural Institute (Wien) and add, Bucharest.
kevinspace.org