The “Teodor Costescu” Palace of Culture in Drobeta Turnu-Severin inaugurates on Friday, July 21, 2023, the “Water from Installations” project, which will take place at the Castle of the Arts, formerly the Water Tower.
The exhibition within the project, “All the water was already there,” includes a series of interventions from the area of ​​contemporary art in a museum space dedicated to local heritage and aims to add a new layer of cultural content to complement the exhibitions already existing in this historical building of the city.

Five artists with whom Galeria Posibilă from Bucharest collaborates: Bogdan Gîrbovan, Denise Lobonţ, Dan Perjovschi, Ghenadie Popescu, and Miruna Radovici, will conceive a series of works in mixed techniques, audio-video, photography, drawing, installation, aiming to create a dialogue with the monument building in Drobeta Turnu Severin, whose historical memory is inextricably linked to water.

Bogdan Gîrbovan (born in Drobeta Turnu Severin) is a photographer known for his projects, especially for “10/1”, appealing for how the same type of apartment is inhabited and manipulated in so many ways, being also acquired by relevant cultural institutions such as the National Museum of Contemporary Art in Romania and private collections. The themes and cultural motifs he approached in his photographic projects opened new perspectives on understanding various social categories, inhabited spaces, and their evolution over time.
His works have been exhibited abroad at Gallery 400 in Chicago, Kunsthalle Winterthur, and ViennaFair.

Denise Lobonţ is a visual artist who works mainly in the medium of photography and uses the format of documentation offering counter-narratives in which established social constructs are exposed and questioned. Her practice is motivated by addressing gender identity, minority inclusion, and ecology. Recently, she participated in a residency at the Urban Nation Museum of Contemporary Art in Berlin and a group exhibition at the art gallery of the Romanian Cultural Institute in Berlin.

Dan Perjovschi, one of the most acute and reactive artists in interpreting current social and political themes internationally, draws critically with humor directly on the walls of art institutions worldwide – as he will do at the former Water Tower.
He had personal exhibitions at Tate Modern London, MoMA New York, Macro Roma, Kunsthalle Hamburg, Nasher Museum Duke University, etc., and group exhibitions at Center Pompidou Paris, Tate Liverpool, MoMA San Francisco, MUAC Mexico, etc. He participated in Documenta 15 and art biennials in Istanbul, Venice, Sao Paulo, Moscow, Sydney, Lyon, Dublin, Iasi, Timisoara, and Jakarta. In 2022, Galeria Posibilă organized a retrospective exhibition of his artist books.

Ghenadie Popescu is a Moldovan artist interested in local (post-communist) particularities of common visions of identity, tradition, and geopolitical mix. Using different forms of expression, such as performance, video art, and animation, he refers to the absurdity of the world in which he lives and works. Since 2012, he has been mainly involved in personal stop-motion animation projects. Since 2019, he has been part of an extensive research project of the Posibilă Gallery dedicated to the use of the landscape and participated in group exhibitions in Romania and the Republic of Moldova.

Miruna Radovici is an artist who investigates the development of a universe as the works stage the core of social evolution: interactions, language, touch, appearance, and the organic disappearance of emotion. Her artistic activity in various mediums (drawing, painting, ceramics, sound, installation, video) has recently been exhibited in Bucharest, at Appartere (part of Romanian Design Week), Romanian Art Dealers Art Fair, Malmaison Workshops and at Galeria Posibilă and in Iasi, at Romanian Creative Week, Galeria Artep.

All the works made within this project will become part of the monument’s collection and will be archived online and accessible on the website casteluldeapa.com.

Brief description of the context in which the cultural project will be carried out

The project proposed by Galeria Posibilă is at the intersection between visual arts and cultural heritage, which is why the organizers consider it a typical artistic intervention that aims to capitalize on an iconic industrial heritage objective of the city of Drobeta Turnu-Severin (the old Water Tower), which has become a museum-hub with exhibition spaces (on four rings) and collaborative spaces (one ring).
The installations of the five artists will be placed here and thought of in an organic connection with the elements from the thematic exhibitions located on four of the five rings of the tower, all made by Zeppelin Studio, winner of the DASA 2020 European award, awarded by the European Museum Academy, for the most innovative exhibition concept (Anton Pann Memorial House, Bucharest).

The primary need of the project is to change the local cultural landscape and to finally provide a space for the manifestation and exhibition of contemporary art.

Project coordinator: Palace of Culture “Teodor Costescu” Drobeta Turnu Severin
The project was realized with the financial support of the National Cultural Fund Administration.
Partner: Possible Gallery from Bucharest

Galeria Posibilă, established in March 2003 in a house with a courtyard in old Bucharest, a detail that marked its identity, started stimulated by the desire to create a fair, ethical, and sustainable working environment and interaction between artists, the public, and collector, be it public or private. In the last decade, Posibilă focused on “landscape use” in a contemporary understanding of the term through continuous deconstruction and problematization, creating transdisciplinary interactions with anthropologists, artists, biologists, ecologists, and landscapers. Another recurring topic for the gallery is the sustainability of the young artist, thus succeeding through the Master’s program, to come to the support of the most dynamic emerging artists alongside whom he recently began to discover other broad research topics.
An institution for promoting and disseminating local art, attentive and interested in a contextualization beyond the local Romanian geographical space, is possible.