Iosif
Király
fotograf
ABOUT THE RESIDENT
Iosif Király is one of the most renowned artists working with photography in Romania.
In the 1980s, he extensively used photography for various experiments and to document his installations and performances and then disseminated them through the mail art network, an international underground movement with roots in Fluxus.
In 1995 he was among the co-founders of the Department of Photography and Media Arts at the National University of Arts (UNArte) in Bucharest, where he is presently professor and Director of the Doctoral School.
He initiated, coordinated, and together with architects, visual artists, and anthropologists, participated in research and documentary projects related to the changes that occurred in post-communist Romania: Ro_Archive, D-Platform, Tinseltown, etc.
Through photography, installation art, drawing and video, Kiraly investigates the relationship between perception, time, synchronicity, and memory.
His work spans more than four decades, from performances for the camera of the 1970s and 1980s, through the subjective documentary photography of the 1990s and the large-scale photographic installations made using archival images as part of his work in the subREAL group, to the multi-layered panoramic and poly perspectival images of the Reconstructions project and the more recent photographic assemblages in the Echoes, Sinapsys, and Old People Feel the Weather in Their Bones projects.
ABOUT THE RESIDENCY
Topophilia and memory: the path to light leads through the factory
Terra Banatica will present us with a more difficult, more ambivalent form of topophilia: one connected to an industrial heritage whose character is neither purely heroic, nor purely nostalgic. The workshops and locomotives of Reșița carry the memory of a heavy industry that literally shaped the intimate structure of life and coexistence in the region: from the way workers’ neighbourhoods were organized to what it meant, for generations, to live according to the rhythm of a factory.
Photography, among all the artistic disciplines proposed along the trail, is perhaps best suited to inhabit this ambivalence, because it literally develops, both in the technical sense of the term and in the conceptual sense of the project, the passage from darkness into light. Documenting this heritage represents an act of acknowledging and reconciling with a complex past, at times painful, at times viewed through an ambiguous sense of nostalgia.
The aim of the residency is to undertake a rigorous visual documentation of Reșița’s industrial heritage (workshops, railway lines, locomotives, disused or still partially active production spaces) with particular attention to the way these structures have shaped the community life around them. We do not approach them merely as “industrial ruins” to be documented. Beyond a photographic eye, this endeavour requires a sensitivity to the ethical complexity of this type of heritage.
ABOUT THE REGION
Via Transilvanica crosses the Banat mountains, entering Caraș-Severin county through the Iron Gate of Transylvania, the mountain pass between the Țarcu and Poiana Ruscă mountains. From here, the trail crosses part of the Gugulan land and winds its way among the scattered mountain and hillside settlements, through national parks and ancient forests.
Terra Banatica also bears the traces of an industrial history that profoundly transformed the region. In Reșița and Oțelu Roșu, the industrial heritage recalls the communities that grew around the steelworks and the generations for whom working with metal became a defining part of their identity. In the coal-mining villages, this history can be discovered through encounters with people who still preserve the memory of old trades and of a world built around labour.
The forest and the factory, the mountain settlement and the workers’ town, the waters of the Nera and the fire of the forge together form the story of one of the most complex regions crossed by Via Transilvanica, one that helps hikers come to terms with recent history. The factory, symbol of a complicated era, is embraced as part of the human experience.
ABOUT THE CULTURAL IMPRINT LEFT ON THE REGION
The outcome of the residency will be a photographic exhibition, conceived from the very beginning as a travelling one across the entire Terra Banatica region, much like a hiker moving along the trail. In essence, the exhibition becomes a form of mobile heritage: the images travel through the region just as travellers cross it on foot, carrying the visual memory of its industrial past to communities that may not have easy access to a conventional museum space.
