Performance Cry-Baby during the opening: How to Win Hearts and Influence People, with Irina Gheorghe and Mădălina Dan, 20h

High Heel Communism will be the first large-scale presentation of the work of the Romanian duo The Bureau of Melodramatic Research in Germany. The Bureau of Melodramatic Research (BMR) was founded in 2009 in Bucharest by artists Irina Gheorghe (b. 1981) and Alina Popa (1982-2019) as an institution whose aim is to investigate the role of emotions, as key elements of melodrama, in a wider social context. In the Bureau’s practice, a subjective, affected and highly emotional genre is brought into the space of a rigorous investigation. Melodrama provides not only a subject for research, but also a working method.

The project High Heel Communism is the first work developed by The Bureau of Melodramatic Research after Alina Popa’s premature death in 2019. The idea of equality produced with the technological support of the heel is in keeping with the Bureau’s concerns and methodologies: an instrumentarium belonging to the production of a stereotypical image of femininity provides the context for a reflection on wider socio-political themes.

For the exhibition at the Kunstverein, the project was developed into a mixed media installation including photographs, mannequins, costumes, prints, performances, as well as a newly produced 16mm film. The film starts from existing footage from the shooting of the titular photograph and the opening performance at the exhibition Heart Beat Detection Systems in Bucharest 2022. From there it expands into a wider reflection on ideas of social equality, gender representation and the role of the high heel as a symbolic instrument of subversion.

A new performance was developed in connection with the film. Premiere with  Irina Gheorghe and Silvia Costin on 7 July 2023, 20h.

*Cry-Baby: How to Win Hearts and Influence People: Cry-Baby: How to Win Hearts and Influence People is a performance in which the Bureau’s founders, Alina Popa and Irina Gheorghe, would cry continuously with the help of onions for the duration of any event in which the work would be shown. In addition to the performance, the Cry-Baby guide was produced as a work on paper, containing a set of instructions on how to use onion to control one’s display of emotions in the public space. In the Cry-Baby guide, BMR proposes a new etiquette of tears for socially forbidden outbursts. In Berlin the work will be performed by Irina Gheorghe and Mădălina Dan.

Mădălina Dan is a Romanian dancer and performer based in Berlin. Her work has been shown in numerous exhibitions and festivals including in Bozar; Brussels, Hebbel am Ufer & TanzFabrik, Berlin; Tanzquartier Wien; Springdance Festival, Utrecht; Southbank Center & Chisenhale Dance Space, London

The Bureau of Melodramitic Research (BMR for short) was founded in 2009 by Irina Gheorghe (b. 1981) and Alina Popa (1982-2019). Work by the bureau has been shown in numerous group exhibitions, including at the National Museum of Contemporary Art Bucharest; HOME Manchester; Pratt Manhattan Gallery, NY; Times Museum, Guangzhou; SAVVY Contemporary, Berlin; Martin Gropius Bau, Berlin; TRAFO, Budapest; bak: basis voor aktuele kunst, Utrecht; mumok Kino, Vienna. Outside the BMR, Irina Gheorghe works mainly with performance, in combination with installation, collage, photography, sound or video. Thematically, her works revolve around the attempt to speak about things beyond our perceptual possibilities – from extraterrestrial life forms to hypothetical planets. Alina Popa, who initially studied finance, focused her artistic research on affect theory, specifically the relationship between neoliberalism and melodrama and the ideological connections between mountaineering and nationalism. She has had exhibitions and performances at MUMOK, Vienna; DEPO, Istanbul and Martin Gropius Bau, Berlin, among others.

@irinagheorghe1907  @museum_broadcasting_loneliness