Until January 28, 2023, Apparatus 22 offers to the public the result of a project carried out over the last seven years, a series of installations centered on the story of Atletica Ideal, a hybrid character created by the group’s members.

Within the Suprainfinit Gallery, Atletica Ideal will take the viewers through its entire narrative thread, a true story, related to how something artificial can perceive a human sensation, purely based on sensory stimuli.

“All this research had to be done really smoothly, hidden, farther and farther away from suspicions, while I was milked by humans of my expertise in abandoned knowledge, of my abilities to agglutinate so many disparate thoughts and information into something new” (On the curious digressions of Atletica Ideal. A report., video installation, 15′ 24″).

The machinery created by the Apparatus 22 collective is a perspective from an artificial “being”, originating from the human-technological fusion, within the exhibition space being created a true utopian universe.

The artists placed a site-specific installation, ‘The Owls Are Not What They Seem’, consisting of a curtain, which divides the space into 3 areas by its positioning. Within each obtained part, aspects such as love, pleasure, or desire are studied and rendered through site-specific works.

The curtain, in its traditional sense of privacy and concealment, becomes in the exhibition “Of Pleasure: The Learnings and Strange Fortunes of Atletica Ideal” a point of separation between the seen and the unseen, between reality and the universe imagined in the story told by Athletica Ideal’s mechanic voice.

Apparatus 22 is a collective artistic group founded in January 2011 in Bucharest that focuses on the creation of multi-disciplinary, dreamlike works, which punctuate aspects related to politics, economy, social studies, gender, and religion. Erika Olea, Maria Farcaș, Dragoș Olea, and Ioana Nemeș (1979-2011) dedicate their artistic activity to better understanding contemporary society and helping shape the queer future. Starting in 2015, they worked both in Bucharest and Brussels, especially in the space at Suprainfinit.

In conjunction with the exhibition, the artistic collective presents, as a free public service outside the gallery space, THE CONTINUUM BROADCAST (2017 – work in progress), a nomad and participatory sound installation which is taking place in the domestic spaces of the participants.

The utopian universe outlined by Apparatus 22 in their show “Of Pleasure: The Learnings and Strange Fortunes of Atletica Ideal” can still be visited until January 28, 2023, at the Suprainfinit Gallery, from Wednesday to Sunday between 12 and 6 p.m.

Cultural project co-funded by the Administration of the National Cultural Fund.