The Bureau of Melodramatic Research: High Heel Comunism opens this Friday, June 9 at Kunstverein am Rosa-Luxemburg Platz in Berlin, Germany

We are pleased to announce the opening of The Bureau of Melodramatic Research exhibition High Heel Communism at Kunstverein am Rosa-Luxemburg Platz on June 9, realised in partnership with Suprainfinit. The exhibition is the first large-scale presentation of the Bureau's work in Germany, featuring a new 16 mm film and a performance developed in connection with the film by artists Irina Gheorghe and Silvia Costin that will premiere later in the summer on July 7, 2023.

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The new video draws on footage taken during the 2022 opening of HEARTBEAT DETECTION SYSTEMS, the Bureau's first solo show at Suprainfinit.

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The Berlin exhibition, framed as a multimedia installation, will also include the performance Cry-Baby: How to Win Hearts and Influence People, performed by Irina Gheorghe and Mădălina Dan.

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The Bureau of Melodramatic Research (BMR) is a dependent institution founded by Irina Gheorghe and Alina Popa in 2009 to investigate the role of emotions in contemporary politics and the new economy. Interested in the ramified circulation of affect that lies at the core of neoliberal society, the Bureau examines the power of language and emotions through weaving together real and fictional topoi to generate potentiality for subversiveness. BMR investigates the way in which key elements of melodrama are currently at work on the contemporary political scene. Its research into multiple forms of hierarchies, structures and statistics interrogates the circulation of emotional capital and adopts a melodramatic methodology, namely the melo-critique. BMR projects include a self-help guide for public crying, a safety training for the new office work, a cooking show using love and gold as central ingredients, and a weather forecast camouflaged as a melodrama scene in contemporary industrial Romania. 

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The Bureau's work was shown at the National Museum of Contemporary Art Bucharest; SUPRAINFINIT Gallery, Bucharest; Goethe Institut-Bukarest; Trafó House of Contemporary Arts, Budapest; HOME, Manchester; Pratt Manhattan Gallery, New York; Times Museum, Guangzhou; WING Hong Kong; SAVVY Contemporary, Berlin; Art Encounters Biennial, Timisoara; Skolska 28 Gallery, Prague; bak, Utrecht; Museum Moderner Kunst Vienna; DEPO, Istanbul; Ujazdowsky Castle, Warsaw; messagesalon, Zurich; Center for Visual Introspection, Bucharest; Galeria Posibilă, Bucharest; among others.

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