Florin Flueras : Unofficial Unworks

Unofficial Unworks are Unexperiences, Unimages, Unhere, Love appearing uninvited at important art events, enacted by visitor-performers, skipping and overriding structures of validation, going around gates of access, introducing a playful disregard of conventions, protocols and implicit expectations, behaving like the constraints of the art world are not there, or like they're there just to play with – using certain artworld dynamics as playfield and aiming more for playful transgressions than for institutional critique. As visitors, we usually conform, performing our roles, consuming quietly what is in front of our eyes. As artists, we mostly follow the art world's implicit codes, protocols and requirements, hoping to be seen, invited, appreciated. As people, we conform to prevailing perspectives and certainties. Artists can and should sometimes deviate from these dynamics. Visitors too.

Unofficial Unworks introduces in art events body states, presences and affects that subtly intervene in the affective atmosphere of the venues where they appear, affecting and being affected by the respective contexts, acting on their ambiance. More than conceptual, visual or institutional it's love based. “Love” in its expanded sense, as the affective base of reality, which, in a mysterious way, sensible bodies can sometimes sense and affect. It moves art from objects to situations, from walls, images and objects into the visitors’ bodies and the affective atmosphere of a place, affecting implicit certainties, norms, conventions and expectations.

Unofficial Unworks might also appear on the streets, in supermarkets, institutions, airports, trains, and other public spaces, bringing a contrast that can performatively interfere with the normality of those contexts, opening and reshaping the sensible substrate of the respective realities. Since affects are contagious, the entire atmosphere and situations can be influenced. Temporary zones of possibility might open.

Notes from inside, documentation as text.

Unofficial Unworks at OFF-Biennale Budapest, (and official at Artus Gallery) (2025)

Unofficial Unworks at Venice Biennale (2024)

Performers Eliza Trefas, Florin Flueras

Eliza Trefas:

People stopped, looked at us with pleasure, suspicion, pleasure from suspicion, with concern, some smiling, and, rather often, suspended in an inability to fix us into any definitive position: visitors, artists, performers, something entirely else to worry about? Are they weirdly crazy or wit tricksters? Visitors as well as some of the official cameramen from the pavilions pulled out their cameras to film us. It seemed we triggered a kind of "subtle performance" for some, affecting the usual flow of the broader artworld-spectacle, interrupting the automatisms of running through the exhibition, consuming the works in a predominantly visual and intellectual manner. ... The whole trick is to trick everything, to find gaps where to insert your work both in your everyday life practice, and in this case also at important art events... more

Florin Flueras:

Unofficial Unworks at Venice Biennale felt like from another universe – we were not just foreigners but aliens, coming from a parallel artworld, with different implicit references, motivations, approaches... And somehow that's the idea with Unofficial Unworks, to behave like the constraints of the art world are not there, or like they're there just to play with. It just skips implicit art world perspectives, conventions and protocols – playing its own game, using certain artworld dynamics as playfield and aiming more for playful transgressions than for institutional critique. Unofficial Unworks is alien also because it's on the side of the visitors in the art-visitors relationship. It's not so much about art objects, images or performances placed in front of our eyes, but more about how we are experiencing such things. More than retinal or conceptual is an affect based meta-art, done from the posture of visitors, and activated in their bodies.

I'm mostly interested in what is the practice behind a work, what kind of new sensibility, thinking and perspectives are necessary for producing and perceiving it, and not so much about what it is about, or by whom. In this sense I was surprised to see there a lot of self-colonizing ways of doing and presenting art. Especially the main exhibition seems to be a lot about who and what, about identity and representation, and mostly conventional image or object based works, very little anything process based, performative or meta. This is surprising also because if we take only South America, from where the curator is, there are works that can easily rewrite the history of contemporary art, truly foreign to the established ways of producing and perceiving art. In this context Unofficial Unworks felt as an even more necessary deviation from the default forms of doing, presenting and receiving art, hopefully also for the visitors that entered in contact with it.