Romanian film director Adina Pintilie opens exhibition in Stuttgart

The 'Adina Pintilie. You Are Another Me. A Cathedral of the Body' exhibition, centered on the work of Romanian director and screenwriter Adina Pintilie, recently opened at the Württembergischer Kunstverein Stuttgart.

Originally conceived for the 2022 Venice Biennale, the Stuttgart exhibition marks both the German premiere of the project and a new stage in its evolution, presenting Adina Pintilie's new work, the cinematic-performative installation 'Waffenstillstand' ('Weapons Standing Still'), produced in close collaboration with the host institution's team, to the public for the first time. The work reconstitutes the cinematic 'apparatus' at the core of the artist's practice, the 'alchemical space' where reality and cinema merge, and images are born. 

The exhibition is open to the public until January 14, 2024.

At the end of the exhibition, on the evening of January 11, the new work 'Waffenstillstand' will be activated through a live cinematic performance in which the protagonists, along with Pintilie and her team, will invite the audience in Stuttgart to witness and become participants in their filming process, referred to by the artist as 'emotional incubation.'

The moment is meant to explore how time, memory, and intimacy are experienced. By reenacting memories and desires, sharing rituals and affective gestures, this process creates what the artist calls a 'mirror' space-time, between transience and transcendence, where bodies discover each other and gazes turn inward. 

'Adina Pintilie. You Are Another Me. A Cathedral of the Body' is part of a series of exhibitions conceived by WKV Württembergischer Kunstverein Stuttgart, dedicated to intersectional feminist and queer approaches in art, film, activism, and research since 2007. Artists featured in previous exhibitions include Anna Oppermann, Ines Doujak, Imogen Stidworthy, Lorenza Böttner, Carrie Mae Weems, Trinh T. Minh-ha, Delphine Seyrig, and now Adina Pintilie. 

The exhibition marks the latest stage of the multi-platform artistic research project on intimacy and corporeality initiated by Adina Pintilie, in collaboration with a team from several European countries, celebrating intercultural exchanges and collaboration beyond national borders. Through various artistic languages and platforms, including installation, cinema, sculpture, and performance, her long-term transdisciplinary research explores how people relate to others and themselves.

A unique contribution to current conversations reevaluating gender norms and bodily diversity, Adina Pintilie's distinctive perspective is conveyed through a singular visual aesthetic and a seductive rethinking of the power of moving images and the politics of looking. Born from her personal experiences and long-term collaboration with her protagonists, as well as collective experimentation inspired by therapeutic practices and bodywork, the artist's idiosyncratic methodology, explores how early childhood - our cognitive and affective development from that pre-verbal formative period - deeply impacts the way we relate to others and navigate the world. 

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(Photo source: courtesy of the artist Adina Pintilie & Manekino Film)