About

“Nucleu 0000” emerged from the initiative of artist Gabriela Mateescu, who, after completing her studies, found herself wanting to contribute more actively to the local art scene. Many of her peers had already secured employment in other domains, leaving the cultural field, and she assumed the role of an intermediary between them and the local art scene. In 2014, having recently joined one of the city’s most important galleries, Victoria Art Center, and working as an assistant professor at the University of Arts in Bucharest, Mateescu took the initiative to organize pop-up events in various spaces across Bucharest based on availability, be it abandoned or project spaces, artist run-spaces, or commercial galleries.

The initial years were characterized by collective efforts, with artists voluntarily participating in the setting up of exhibitions (Marina Oprea, taieztel ticalos, Diana Miron, Andrei Mateescu, Tristan, Alina Marinescu etc.). The name “Nucleu 0000” originated from the idea of forming a nucleus of artists, and as the number of exhibitions grew, it was appended to the numbers: 0001, 0002, and so forth. The whimsical goal was to reach 1,000. When they secured a space for free to organize events for a year at The Center for Multimedia Arts, offered by the Union of Visual Arts in Romania, the numbering system was halted, and the space was offered for individual or group exhibitions by various artists within the group.

In 2019, the group took on legal form, transforming into a non-governmental organization (NGO) to facilitate access to funding for their projects.

The projects continued to maintain the pop-up aspect, involving artists from Gabriela’s generation as well as others and became more interdisciplinary, research-based, collective, community-driven, process-oriented, and focused on the artists themselves rather than the final artistic object. They emphasized paying artists, providing opportunities for artists with jobs outside the art system to exhibit alongside more well-known artists, documenting and questioning the role of studios in an artist’s journey, and advocating for affordable studios to help artists continue their work after completing their studies.

Today, the association strives to undertake at least one project per year to continue building a network and supporting its members. Under the umbrella of Nucleu 0000, several interests and themes have emerged, including the exhibition of women artists (through workshops, exhibitions, zines, and awareness campaigns under the “Spot the Women! Where is she?” initiative), a focus on new media and digital art (which eventually branched into “spam-index,” the only informational platform on digital art in Romania), a campaign for affordable artist studios, and the documentation of the studios of the Union of Fine Artists in Romania—the only institution offering long-term affordable studios, many of which were lost after the 1990s. The last project, UAP Studios, is dedicated to documenting artists and buildings before they disappear entirely, making efforts to preserve and celebrate the diversity the studios nurture.