Romanian interdisciplinary artist (b. 1969)

(performance artist, vocal performer, composer, soundactor, costume designer, stage director)

 

She attended the Georges Enesco Music Lycée, Bucharest, specialising in piano (1988), an the National University of Music, Bucharest, specialising in musicology (1994) and then composition (1996). She has Master’s Degrees in Musicology (1995) and Composition (1997) and was awarded a PhD in Musical Studies in 2003. She is a graduate of the National University of Music’s MIDAS postdoctoral programme. Her output as a composer includes instrumental pieces, chamber music, electronic music, symphonic works, and theatre music.

Since 2008, she has dedicated her career to interdisciplinary, hybrid, fusion and performance art. Her “crossing-borders” projects (Magic, Shopping in ParadoXphere, Talking to my Fears, Fairies and Fishes, It’s all about me or the Day From Midnight, Your Highness, What about your freedom?, ArtSpa, MMMuzMobil, Posthumanism, Zoopera, Ghostphony) have initiated and developed a personal direction based on spontaneity and provocative attitudes, whereby Irinel Anghel continuously explores and extends her imagination and means of expression by employing combinations of movement, theatre and singing/spoken word. She is an advocate of experiential art with surrealist and post-humanist detents. Irinel Anghel is a winner of the Prize of the Union of Romanian Composers and Musicologists (1998, 1999, 202, 2004, 2014, 2017) and the Romanian Academy’s Georges Enesco Prize (1999). From 2010 to 2012, Irinel Anghel was the artistic director of International New Music Week.

She represents the experiential side of Romanian contemporary art, exploring uncharted territories, crossing paths and concepts such as “posthumanism”, “temporary disturbing art”, “real-fictions”. Irinel Anghel is, perhaps, more than anything a conceptual artist, an artist who carefully thinks out her projects, which she imbues with multi-layered semantics.

In the autochthonous context, Irinel Anghel embraces interdisciplinarity, nondisciplinarity and this creation with dissolved borders, which she considers to be experience-art: she never repeats her projects, she is not interested in trodden directions, already accepted solutions, artistic fashions or intellectual and emotional comfort. She does not strive to please at any cost, but, acknowledging her role of radar-artist, unafraid of the form of artistic disturbance or irony-art, through apparent unbalances she restores the cultural balance of the moment.