The most beautiful of my possible lives
2023
Installation, various media
Location: Corneliu Miklosi Public Transport Museum

Installation in collaboration with the Faculty of Engineering and Applied Technologies of the University of Life Sciences  ’Regele Mihai’ Timișoara

“When I saw my name on the list of those rejected from the university entrance exam for Agronomy, I felt like the ground was collapsing from under my feet. And there, in that frantic and noisy crowd in front of the notice board, I decided that I would never again take the entrance exam for Agronomy and that I would never, but NEVER again enter a greenhouse, where I dreamed of working as a young agronomist.”*

The project The most beautiful of my possible lives refers to a turning point in Renée Renard’s autobiography - her failed entrance exam to the Faculty of Agronomy. The installation created for the space in the Corneliu Miklosi Museum represents a first stage of the collaboration between the artist and the Faculty of Engineering and Applied Technologies, the second stage will materialise in autumn 2023, as part of a new Avantpost group exhibition at the Young Naturalists’ Research Centre.

The project brings an artist’s studio and a scientific research laboratory face to face, initiating a dialogue between two apparently different languages and narratives: that of artistic creativity, of the desire to experiment without constraints, in which the only barrier is imagination, and that of scientific research and creativity, based on real, concrete, measurable and quantifiable data.

* An eloquent example of how NEVER can sometimes be more than relative is the Efemer installation that the artist presented in 2021 in one of the greenhouses of the Young Naturalists’ Research Centre, as part of Avantpost’s exhibition Oasis. Green Identity.

Bio
Renée Renard is a graduate of the Faculty of Arts and Design in Timișoara (BA in Multimedia Design, MA in Advertising and Book Graphics, MA in Sculpture and Ceramics) and the Faculty of Veterinary Medicine. She is currently a first year PhD student at the Faculty of Arts and Design Timișoara. 

She approaches two main themes in her personal artistic creation: the convergence between science and art (she initiated the Laboratories of Memory in Timișoara ) and the documentation/ interpretation of her family micro-history with central European origins as well as of the settlers who arrived in Banat in the 18th century (in her works A road as long as a hundred lives, faBRIQUE, Micro-Terra Banatica). Her preferred media of expression are installation, object, mixed media under the microscope, photography/video under the microscope and underwater, digital

processing, adaptations of old Japanese techniques such as kintsugi and tataki zome. To date she has had 16 solo exhibitions and over 60 participations in group exhibitions at home and abroad. She was awarded the Murano Prize of the Abate Zanetti School of Glassmaking in Murano/ Italy (2013), the Prize of the Municipality of Portet sur Garonne/ France at the Triennale Européenne de L’Estampe Contemporaine (2016), the First Prize for microphotography at Micromaps 1st edition of the Faculty of Art and Design Timișoara and the Regional Centre for Research and Expertise in Conservation-Restoration (2021).

She is a member of UAP Timisoara Multimedia section (since 2010) and of the Avantpost group.