L'année dernière à Malmaison catalogue documents the exhibition from 2022 at /SAC @ Malmaison, a subjective foray into Malmaison’s temporalities, connecting its overlapping histories not only with the history of culture, but also with our own sensibilities, characteristic of cultural responses to both real and ideal culture. The catalogue comprises three parts: the first is dedicated to the pictures from the exhibition, accompanied by the plans of the Malmaison building and explanatory text inserts, the second includes the works of art photographed individually, accompanied by informative and short data descriptions, and the last section is dedicated to curatorial texts.

 

Situated in the capital of Romania - Bucharest, the Malmaison building is 177 years old. It had a transient historical and cultural route. Former military barracks, military officers’ school, military tribunal, Secret Police Agency’s detention center from the beginning of the communist regime, a transit prison, later transformed into Iprochim - a research center in chemical engineering, Malmaison is now occupied by artists.​

There seems to be a kind of a magic hour within Malmaison, even though no one seems to determine it specifically, in which one can experience the building’s stories, the byproducts of the multiple narratives of its different times. It almost seems like time and space become somehow fluid and we enter a liminal spacetime, a moment of transition of internal assumed subjectivity of the choices of human.

 

The exhibition’s title makes a reference to the movie L'Année dernière à Marienbad, to its long-continuous-fluid film shots (similar also with the long Malmaison’s corridors), to its ambiguous/labyrinthine narrative structure, in which time and space are somehow fluid, to its multiple intersections of multiple narratives.