Born in 1979, Bucharest. Lives in Bucharest.
The long-term project Monthly Evaluations (2005-09) by Ioana Nemes is a complex system that records the artist's daily moods and experiences. Nemes has worked on the cycle every day since 2005 and in the İstanbul Biennial presents one day of the work.
Monthly Evaluations is inspired by Virginia Woolf's ideas about the flow of time, and by the colour theory developed by the Swiss psychologist Max Lüscher. Ioana Nemes developed her own system of self-observation that consists of five parameters: physical, emotional, intellectual, financial and a happiness factor. Each day is carefully analysed according to the five criteria, and is given a colour and a quote. The artist has created a database that is not a personal journal but resembles a scientific observation, a kind of note-taking in which the artist is her own guinea pig. Monthly Evaluations describes generic experiences relating to work, ambition, progress and happiness, but rather than a fixed definition, it offers many ways to negotiate and codify reality. When she presents a day from the Monthly Evaluations cycle in a group exhibition, Nemes utilises the autonomy of the wall on which her work is projected, but the final choice of the colour and the quote is determined by a desire to initiate a dialogue with the other works of art and with the exhibition space itself.