Kinema Icon. I don’t know how many of you are familiar with this name or with video art in Romania in general. In case you aren’t, I’ll just tell you that indeed video art is what you think it is. Meaning a kind of art that uses moving images (and sound, most of the time) to make something. This something varies from author to author, but eventually it comes down to feelings, emotions, impressions, opinions.

International video art is an intricate, complex and quite interesting topic, at least that’s what I learned in five years of college. Video art in Romania, on the other hand, was not so developed, although it had some pioneers worth mentioning. Today we are talking about Kinema Ikon or cut short to ki. Why? Because I think that video art should not be explored and understood only by those who studied art, but also by the “general public”, a term I deeply dislike, but this time it fits the purpose.

Călin Man, coordinator of the group from the mid-1990s until now, tells us a little about the beginnings and evolution of kinema ikon and about the group’s activities:

How did kinema ikon start?

Călin Man: kinema ikon began its story in 1970 when George Săbău, professor of aesthetics took the opportunity to start a film workshop at the School of Art in Arad. By 1989, 62 experimental films and 62 documentary films had been produced. The authors come from different backgrounds, are philologists, historians, architects, photographers, printers, graphic artists, poets.

How is kinema ikon after ’89 compared to kinema ikon before this period?

C.M.: There were some recent news about us on TVR and the title was: kinema ikon, 40 years of experimental art, which is flattering: although we turn 50, we look like we’re 40. I spent the first 20 years at the Art School in Arad where, as we all know, the group produced experimental films using the film officially assigned to documentary films. In 1990 kinema ikon became a section of the Museum in Arad. George Săbău took over the theater-music-cinema archive, an archive that over time has been the subject of several exhibitions in the ki: Wunderkammer series, an ongoing project taking place in the ki studio at the Cultural Palace in Parcul Copiilor. Since 2012 kinema ikon has a permanent exhibition space at the Art Museum in Arad, where the most coherent project has been the series of 40 episodes spread over three seasons.

I recap, in more detail:

1970/1989 – 16 mm experimental film (first ki generation)

1990/1993 – conversația magazine

1994/2011 – intermedia magazine (second ki generation)

1994/1996 – mixed media (video, performance, installations)

1996/2006 – works / hypermedia installations on cd-rom or net.art support

2006/2011 – hybrid media ki & kf (third ki generation)

2012/2020 – Wunderkammer / Serial / Internet of ki / survival ki (all ki generations)

since 2014 – MAFA (Media Art Festival Arad)

What did it mean to be a group that produces experimental art during communism, in a context in which artists were often seen as suspicious by the state? How did Kinema Ikon, at that time Atelier 16, manage to get around the communist censorship?

C.M.: Although we’ve had our social involvement and rebellion attitude moments over time, the best decision was to mind our own experiments. Once the magazine conversația (a social dialogue magazine that expressed behind its words the dissatisfaction with the government at the beginning of the 90s) changed into intermedia (a magazine that decided on only one rule: no rules), we returned to what we knew best: nothing. (it’s a risky statement, but in this paragraph it sounds good).

I feel the need to share a story happening in 1995 when George Săbău managed to respond to the second invitation of Centre Pompidou to make a screening of 22 ki experimental films made between the 70s and 80s (after the first invitation was canceled in 1987 by Securitate): after the Paris screening, at the Q&A, a young man from Sorbonne showed his dismay over the message of the films: although the system was oppressive and vigilant, we succeeded (or so we were led to believe?) to make films against the regime. How is that possible? Mr. Săbău found the explanation: although the authors did not intend to make anti-communist films, there was a quite strange atmosphere in the films, the shots were atypical to the propaganda of that time, there was an irony implied, the films were in black and white or in unnatural colors. All these elements, after a longer screening, gave the viewer the feeling of discomfort, irritation, revolt, etc. Seemed like there’s just one step between this point and the idea of dissidence. Ever since the “cineclub” times, the Thursday meetings when most of the members were getting together and planning the country’s future were quite famous.

What can you tell us about the experience of representing Romania at the Venice Biennale in 2003?

C.M .: At the beginning of the 90s, we were very happy to be connected directly to the world. We were witnesses, but also participants in the first events of the Internet. I was so fascinated with the digital that I skipped the stage of film on video tape and went directly to the so-called exclusively digital stage – we felt that, in the 21st century, the computer is a very natural thing. And to be clear, we organized in 2002 at the Art Museum in Arad a symposium that had the digital and what we call with reluctance “art” as a theme for debate. Romanian artists and curators working in new media were present at the event. That’s when we launched the hypermedia alteridem.exe installation.

kinema ikon had at that time two more works on CD-ROM, and I was unstoppable on how much enthusiasm and numerical work I could produce and could exhibit in the most sought-after exhibitions and festivals of the genre. There was an international trend favorable to this kind of approach and I think that for this reason I went to Venice, in the Romanian pavilion with three hypermedia, rhizomatic, complex, playful, terminator, atypical installations. There were reactions of all kinds: angry chroniclers upset that I have tarnished the national honor, British mathematicians happy to have found complex digital works in a pavilion that rarely hosted such exhibitions or curators from art museums like Centre Pompidou 🙂 encore une fois …  I spent the end of the year at Beaubourg where this time I presented my digital work and in particular the work purchased by the museum: The Golden Virus & Other Web Site Stories. And over the next two years, I reviewed the entire kinema ikon set of works in order to produce an exhaustive catalog. As a result, we transformed all the ki works into interactive works which eventually became the subject of a retrospective in 2005 at the MNAC.

What’s your view on the evolution of video art and / or multimedia art in Romania? What does video art mean in the age of the internet? How does the term video art change its meaning in the age of the Internet?

C.M .: From the above questions, I’ve got two words: film and Internet. If I also add installation to them, that would pretty much describe the ki activity of late.

1. film: After the enthusiasm for digital has toned down and the third generation of young people who used to gravitate around the alternative art space / coffee shop – KF started to make their presence felt, and after the Art Museum in Arad provided us with an exhibition space, we started the series which after three seasons and 40 episodes / media installations have remained as 40 author films.

Lately, I like to show these films in parallel with the experimental films on 16 mm. And the 16mm films (both experimental and documentary) are presented in various installations where we bring the latest technology. The exhibition at Scena 9 dedicated to film is a good example of revisiting the kinema ikon films. The almost 200 films are the lego pieces we will keep playing with for a while.

2. Internet: with the exhibition internet of ki we found a digital comeback after more than ten years, during which time the Internet has been messing around and really brainwashed the famous user of the 90s who then knew how to be fast and furious. (I still pause and contemplate the Internet in its vastness, like a beautiful colorful sky above the Mikalaka neighborhood and I know that we just need to release the creature, from here from the computer in kinema ikon office, while the well-tempered user unravels the secrets of a new experimental adventure.)

After the Kinema Ikon retrospective that took place at Scena 9 and ended on December 6th, what are your plans for the future?

C.M .: Our future plan is to open the Time Capsule in time; that is, Tuesday, October 28th, 2070, at 20.16.

Romina Banu

Photographer and editor; she co-founded Dissolved Magazine together with Melissa. For Films in Frame she gathers film and TV series recommendations for lazy weekends and she writes about interesting projects from the film industry. Other than that, she likes traveling, chilling with her cats and sleeping.