One of the objectives of the B5 Studio AiR 2024 program is to focus on local characteristics and spirit, while another is to broaden the scope of residency programs and make different collaboration models visible. Within this framework, the exhibition by Cătălina Nistor, the program’s first invited resident artist, is realized. Reflecting on a topic she has been personally engaged with, she places bilingualism, prevalent in Transylvania and Târgu Mureș, at the center of her artistic practice and learning process. During her five-week stay, Cătălina Nistor gained a surface-level insight into the everyday life of the local Hungarian and Romanian populations, living together or alongside each other.
The works created during the residency program are text- and sound-based, organized into four units around her current interests – school, the ’90s, art, and war – viewed through the lens of authoritarian conceptual frameworks. Nistor draws rather than writes the texts, yet her practice is not comparable to calligraphy.

During the opening event, the larger exhibition space of the two B5 spaces will showcase the works created during the residency program. In the smaller space, attendees can continue to join the reaction and solidarity platform, established by the artist and her curators during the national protest of cultural institutions announced for the Night of Museums. They can also contribute to the artist’s Hungarian language learning project by suggesting words they consider important in their own professions.

Cătălina Nistor’s exhibition entitled ‟I started from minus two” is an intermediate stage in a process. During her stay in Târgu Mureș for nearly a month and a half, Nistor’s attention was focused on spoken language and writing as basic forms of communication. In the present case, Romanian and Hungarian languages are ‟represented”, the latter also being explored by the artist with the intention of learning. During this process, several themes emerged, which were circumscribed by the Romanian and Hungarian words specific to them. Thus, if the viewer carefully groups these words, war, or rather the absence of peace, is outlined. Or, looking back from the present, one can evoke the nineties, with the words typical of those years. At the same time, she also adds a personal story to this sea of words generating images (imagination), namely that during her early practices of learning to write, she was forced – as a victim of a pedagogical method now considered flawed – to use her right hand to write, being left-handed. In this way, she learnt to write with her right hand by necessity, but she still uses her left hand for drawing. This is also illustrated in the video on the screen, as she writes Romanian words with her right hand and their Hungarian equivalent with her left hand, the latter, as we can see, being a much more graphic, pictorial writing. All these make possible, through the use of overhead projectors for enlargement, different layers to be paired by superimposing the foils. The third work is an exercise, also recorded on video, evoking the learning of Romanian and Hungarian pronunciations. Here, one of the coordinators of the programme appears alongside the artist, indicating the working method that the initiating ARTeast Foundation and its curators, József Bartha and Kata Ungvári-Zrínyi, expected from the invited participants. Namely, they wanted a closer, dialogue-based collaboration between the artists and their curators, rather than the usual work process merely based on consultation.
As we have indicated at the beginning of the text, this is a stage, about which the images projected on the walls inform us, but this communication does not stop here, it continues.
Communicating the opening text through sign language shows the difficulties of communication. If we do not have the necessary knowledge to understand it, it can form the basis for misunderstandings that could lead to the events of the Black March in Târgu Mureș.
We hereby consider the mini pop-up exhibition open.
If you did not understand the opening speech, please read its Romanian or Hungarian printed version. Thank you!
Ágnes-Evelin Kispál & Attila Kispál

I have been born in Craiova, and I have been working as an artist in Cluj since 2015.
Through a self-ironic approach, my artistic practice brings taboo subjects and clichés of thought to the surface.
I work with different mediums of expression, from painting or drawing to objects and publications in limited editions, experimenting with various reproduction techniques over the years. In the last four years, I have initiated two collaborative publications, one of which is an ongoing project.

*After the curatorial turn, artistic content is created and mediatised on a number of levels. The curator takes a more creative and active role – working not from outside the artistic process, but from an
internal perspective. And the artist, who has long been a curator of him/herself and of other artists, of other contents and platforms, is always finding new roles for him/herself. Contemporary art transcends the context of the exhibition, but it does not abandon its original forms of realisation, and collaboration is a recurring motif at many junctures.
It is this complex set of relationships that the B5 Studio’s 2024 AiR programme attempts to capture. In addition to the traditional framework of residency programmes, our aim is to explore different models of Collaboration.

Our basic idea is that dialogue and collaboration open up possibilities whereby actors are able to transcend the context (1+1= MANY).
Bartha József és Ungvári-Zrínyi Kata

Special thanks to: Attila Albert, Mária Albert, Márius Cosmeanu, Vlad Dimitriu, István Makkai, Evelin Márton, Kinga Kostyák, Kata Ungvári-Zrínyi, Tibor Vészi

The project is co-financed by the National Cultural Fund**.
** The project does not necessarily represent the position of the National Cultural Fund. The NCF is not responsible for the content of the project or the way in which the results of the project may be used. These are entirely up to the beneficiary of the funding.
Many thanks to Bioeel and Oracler for the support.