POLISTICKS
(/s-)actions, /sanctions, /sections
curated by Alex Radu
with an exhibition design by Justin Baroncea & Maria Ghement & Alexandra Muller
"Polisticks"
Kunstgalerie des Rumänischen Kulturinstituts Berlin
13.11.2025-06.02.2026
artists: Justin Baroncea & Cristian Matei, Olivia Berkemeyer, Floriama Cândea, Sergiu Chihaia, Nicolae Comănescu, Iulian Cristea, Suzana Dan, Dimitrie Luca Gora, Dumitru Gorzo, Ioana Gorzo, Gregor Hildebrandt, Andreea Ilie, Ana Ionescu, Albert Kaan, Hortensia Mi Kafchin, Sorin Prodea, Haleh Redjaian, Mircea Suciu, Philip Topolovac, Dan Vezentan, Jorinde Voigt
The exhibition is organized by /SAC – The Space for Contemporary Art. We would like to thank the Romanian Cultural Institute of Berlin for the support. Cultural project co-financed by Administration of the National Cultural Fund. The project does not necessarily represent the official position of the Administration of the National Cultural Fund. AFCN shall not be held liable for the project’s content or any use to which the project outcome might be put. These are the sole responsibility of the beneficiary of the funding.
It is a subjective and collective meditation on several intertwined themes: What does it still mean to be European in today's general Euro-political dynamics, given the multilateral relations (including cultural and power relations) and their dynamics beyond borders, as well as the vital independent micro-cultural structures that are created in these moments of divergent tensions?
How are all these themes reflected (perhaps in unexpected ways) in our/the artists' personal inner dynamics? In a relatively small space (the gallery of The Romanian Cultural Institute in Berlin) but with many invited artists from Romania and Berlin, this exhibition format could be a poetic manifesto for a metaphorical common European cultural center that would bring together branches spreadthroughout Europe into a shared structure...
It is a plea that comes at a time when it seems that no one can agree on anything anymore. And in the midst and at the basis of any such macrostructures-context are people, individual beings, with all their personal/artistic struggles. In this place/moment/context, the exhibition is about generative connections, about the accumulation of diversities and simultaneities, regarded in composition, not in competition; in the end it is about togetherness.
(/S-)ACTIONS /SANCTIONS /SECTIONS
The three dimensions of the exhibition — /sections, (/s-)actions, /sanctions — frame the works as segments (sticks) of reality. They explore the fragments that construct European identity, the sections trough the socio political system in order to rationally comprehend our cultural environment, the actions that shape our collective present and the sanctions — both visible and invisible — through which society defines and regulates its boundaries and values.
ABOUT THE WORKS AND ARTIST BIOS
JUSTIN BARONCEA & CRISTIAN MATEI + Andrei Angelescu
Arici / Urcin
2025
Sphere with a wooden core, 25 cm in diameter, spikes made of carbon rods, each 50 cm long. Total diameter of the sphere: 120 cm
mixed media: wood, carbon fiber, epoxy adhesive, paint
Gallery hedgehog. Mobile. Meant to wander among the artworks. With no predictable trajectory once moved from its vaguely stable equilibrium. A trouble-seeking hedgehog in the “china cabinet”: move it and see what topples over… an interactive mix between a bowling ball and fishing rods (of problems). Handle with care... Art hazard ahead!
BIO
JUSTIN BARONCEA
Since 2009, Justin Baroncea has been recycling disparate objects, bits of discarded technology, and electrical appliance parts and turning them into seemingly useful UFOs. In 2015, he published a book about rabbits and satellites hanging from the ceiling, and in 2021, a book about foam, wires, and cardboard speakers and squirrels playing the piano.
CRISTIAN MATEI
Interior designer (b. 1986) with a background in sociology, he approaches both interior and exterior spaces with concern for the social and ecological context and focuses on temporary urban interventions and art installations by reusing reclaimed resources and waste materials. The recovery and reintegration of elements resulting from various technological processes and disused structures gives him the opportunity to reinterpret and shape space so as to draw attention to social issues such as the lack of public space adapted to human needs and scale, or the waste of raw materials and the continuous production of waste.
OLIVIA BERKEMEYER
Astrostar
2014
bronze & brass uniquecast fullcast
170 x 40 x 40 cm,
The Astrostar is about the spacetourism and the searching for new places to life, cause our planet seems to collapse in some years. Its about searching and hope, otherwise its about dreams that flys away or better resolves.
Goliath
2012
bronze uniquecast (a cire Perdue)
55 x 43 x 13 cm
The the submarine is the idea of deepest darkness, mystery, morbidity only becomes visible because it appears in the world of light. The ships are held on the plinths by two supports, as if they have just been pulled up from the mysterious depths of the ocean, dripping in sludge, and one instinctively knows: these ships are from the Second World War and they have been lying in the `icy depths’ until now.
BIO
Using the historical casting technique known as the lost wax method, Olivia Berckemeyer (German, b. 1968) forms the original model from which her sculpture is cast by dripping layers of molten wax over forms. It is thus unsurprising that her finished bronze works resemble nothing so much as the mounds of wax surrounding great candlesticks in gothic cathedrals or gradually constructed rock formations in forgotten caves. The manner in which Berckemeyer’s sculptures seem to groaningly emerge from their pedestals calls forth the immense strength used to dredge these melting memories from the morbid and mysterious recesses from which they came.
Berckemeyer was born in Munich, Germany in 1968. She studied at Kunstakademie Düsseldorf from 1992-1997 and now lives and works in Berlin. She has exhibited internationally, participating in solo and group shows in cities such as Berlin, Düsseldorf, Antwerp, Zürich, Vienna, New York, Los Angeles, Detroit, London, Istanbul, and Venice. Her work can also be found in several collections, such as the Boros Collection, the Wurlitzer Collection, and the Landwehr Collection in Berlin, and in the KISS Collection.
FLORIAMA CANDEA
Invisible Garden
2025
installation (decellularized plants, glass tube, stones, metal tubes, LED)
300 × 200 × 150 cm
Invisible Garden approaches the garden as a structural fiction. Decellularized plants—subjected to a process that removes all living cells while preserving the connective scaffold—are presented suspended within a transparent glass tube, reduced to their vascular framework. In this state, they no longer function biologically, yet remain as matrices of identity, as frameworks for our imagination. What we recognize as “garden” is no longer vegetal life itself, but a site where memory, experience, and fiction overlap. The work traces precisely this tension: between matter reduced to infrastructure and identity persisting as narrative, between what is revealed as form and what can still be imagined. Through this distilled gesture, Invisible Garden reflects on how identity may be retained or rewritten, and on how life may be framed when its processes are stripped away. It offers a meditation on transformation, resilience, and the thresholds between life and representation—suggesting an imagined landscape where life survives only as structure and possibility.
BIO
Floriama Candea (b. 1984, Bechet, Romania) explores the dynamics between objects and the way we perceive them by creating hybrid visual identities. Her versatile toolkit spans interactive, kinetic, and video installations to sculpture, experimental electronics, drawing, and printing, with an additional focus on creating visuals using bio-based materials. With the complex relation between science, philosophy and tech, at the core of her artistic practice, she questions our role as well as the stakes of the Anthropocene, at the dawn of a possible new era. Through her installations, she challenges our beliefs and encourage us to re-evaluate our mental constructs that shape our understanding of the present and, by extension, our future. This way, they activate our imagination and function as gateways to alternative narratives and scenarios.
She is the co-founder of Qolony, a Bucharest-based cultural NGO dedicated to creating bridges between various disciplines and communities of professionals. Those include contemporary artists, scientific researchers and diverse technologists, all brought together by their passion for interdisciplinary practices and its creative outcomes.
SERGIU CHIHAIA
Dancing with Life
2025
wood, metal
120,5 x 15 cm
“Dancing with Life reflects a deeply personal period through which I am still passing — one defined by a constant pressure imposed by life itself. Since there is no choice but to go through it, I’ve had to find ways to keep functioning day by day, and this process has become, in a way, a dance.
At first, I wanted to place people beneath this sharply finished wooden spike, inviting them to simply feel its threatening presence , to meditate under its tension. But after spending more time experimenting with it, I realized it was far more interesting to let people interact with the object freely, in their own way.
The work becomes, therefore, a negotiation between tension and movement, fear and play , an invitation to face pressure not with resistance, but with rhythm.”
BIO
Sergiu Chihaia (b. 1982, Verejeni, Republic of Moldova) is a visual artist specializing in fashion. He graduated from the National University of Arts in Bucharest, where he currently holds a teaching position in the Fashion Department. He lives and works in Bucharest. His works have been exhibited in national and international shows (Bucharest, Constanța, London, and Venice) and are part of private collections in England, Italy, and Romania. In 2014, he received the UAP Award for Decorative Arts – Textiles within the Arte în București, 5th edition. Chihaia is a sculptor, textile artist, and designer, and in the creative process, he merges all these disciplines, transforming into a scenographer. Through his artistic vision, he reconstructs the history of the world as a stage — a space of exposure for human dramas, joys, and triumphs.
NICOLAE COMĂNESCU
The Great Scheme (in Berlin)
2024
assemblage made from household furniture panels, textiles, acrylic
75 x129 cm
In The Great General Scheme of All Things, Nicolae Comănescu overlays on recycled supporting structures from the household inventory, volumes of colour made of textile materials, as well as clothes belonging to people close to him. The works thus allow the accumulation/superimposition of different interpretations, on many levels, from ‘comănescian’ playfulness, philosophical and social perspectives to an ontological fear of disappearance and finding one's own way of preservation, in contrast to the metaphorical museification. The piece is part of a series of 24 works entitled The Great Scheme(in Berlin), which becomes a mutation of the original Bucharest genetics through the Berlin experience itself. The wooden structure takes its German essence from the famous Bauhaus shop. The textiles are gathered from a very diverse palette of friends who are brought together from different corners of the world on the same frame-work, the author assembling their chronotopes into a personal composition and making them part of the overall grand scheme.
BIO
Born in 1968 in Pitești, Romania, Nicolae Comănescu graduated in 1998 from the Art Academy in Bucharest, the department of Painting. Together with Dumitru Gorzo, Alina Pențac, Angela Bontaş, Alina Buga, Florin Tudor, and Mona Vătămanu founded the avant-garde group Rostopasca (1997-2002). He currently lives and works in Bucharest. Nicolae Comănescu creates in series, among which the important are: Briemerg’s Algorithm (2000), Wrong Paintings (2004-2007), Paintings with dust (2007-2011), SAMBAdy must dye in this CITY (2014), I can see no revolution (2014), Ordeful, mezanplasul și harneala (2015), SCRAP METAL KABOOM ORCHESTRA (2022), and The Grand General Scheme of All Things (2020- ongoing).
IULIAN CRISTEA
Navigating Inward
2025
resin, fiberglass, gelcoat, auto body filler, pigment
178 x 52 x 17 cm
The work speaks of the transformation taking place when we let ourselves be carried away by the unseen forces of destiny, about the thin line between what we are and what be become upon choosing to dive into the unknown. Getting ahead is not just a physical journey, but an inner metamorphosis – and, sometimes, that thread of wind in our sails is all we have left between loss and rediscovery. Within the context of “The Thin Thread Line” exhibition, sculpture becomes a living metaphor for that fine line between safety and risk, between stability and the courage of letting ourselves be changed by the road.
BIO
Iulian Cristea (b. 1991, Republic of Moldova) studied sculpture at the Academy of Music, Theatre, and Fine Arts in Chișinău, the National University of Arts in Bucharest, and the University of the Arts in Saarbrücken, Germany. He has been awarded in numerous national and international competitions, and his works have been exhibited in Bucharest, Luxembourg, Chișinău, Cluj-Napoca, Timișoara, Craiova, and Bistrița.
SUZANA DAN
Life series. End Dreaming Off Luxury Is a State of Mind You Deserve Pain. You Think. Dreaming.On.
2014 2014 2014 2014 2014
acrylic on canvas acrylic on canvas acrylic on canvas acrylic on canvas acrylic on canvas
10 x 20 cm 20 x 20 cm 60 x 60 cm 60 x 40 cm 25 x 20 cm
Territories of Oblivion
The series, inspired by the short cinematic essay Je me souviens, based on Georges Perec’s text, investigates the fragility and frivolity of the human being as mechanisms of memory and identity perception. The works offer a reflection on how minor experiences, everyday gestures, and traces of passage accumulate into an archive of the ephemeral. Fragility emerges as a condition of existence, a space of vulnerability and exposure — while frivolity is approached as a form of concealing fragility, a gesture of adaptation to the unstable rhythm of the present. Within the tension between the two unfolds a poetics of the human, fragmentary, repetitive, and profoundly transitory.
BIO
Suzana Dan lives and works in Bucharest, a city that, as one artist aptly described in the 2000s, we all love and hate at the same time. Her creative activity spans multiple professional levels, from that of an artist to that of a cultural manager. Interested in collaborative processes and communities from various fields— some more, some less known to the general public—she works alongside artists active in different cultural areas. Passionate about the creative community and beyond, she explores and collaborates with various spaces, from artist-run initiatives to major museum institutions. This path led her, in 2007, to initiate NAG – The White Night of the Galleries, which is currently the longest-running event in Romania dedicated to contemporary culture. Since 2016, she has been directly involved in the development of Rezidența9, a center for contemporary culture, becoming its manager in 2018. Currently, she coordinates Rezidența9, curates exhibitions, imagines projects with and about people, cooks for friends, rarely paints, and carefully curates her social media accounts.
DIMITRIE LUCA GORA
No title
2025
epoxy resin, sponge
76 cm x 43.5 cm
The work starts from a common object found in many Eastern European households — the stainless steel sink, a symbol of utility, everyday labor, and functional aesthetics. By casting epoxy resin and inserting a yellow sponge with a smiling face, the piece merges the Eastern European domestic aesthetic with the global imagery of consumption and prefabricated optimism.
The result is an ironic encounter between two worlds: the rural one, where the sink remains a practical tool for washing, pickling, or making homemade spirits, and the Western society, where the smile has become a logo of cleanliness and comfort. The Sink speaks about Eastern European identity caught between tradition and the idealized image of modernity, between the real and the symbolic, between the useful and the absurd.
BIO
An artist born and raised in Bucharest, Dimitrie is a student and social activist who graduated in 2023 from the Photo-Video department with his bachelor's thesis, “Camera de Logopedie” (“The logopedics room”). He practices various art forms, including photography, video, installation, painting and sculpture, using creativity to support social and artistic causes. His installations are designed by combining everyday objects from his childhood with nostalgic and ironic elements.
DUMITRU GORZO
Scufița Magenta / Little Magenta Riding Hood
2022
carved wood, paint
1 m x 50 x 20 cm
…the people, place, history, and folk characteristics that fuel the artist’s creative mind most trenchantly are those that can be localized to Maramures – the small, relatively remote village where he grew up in the Carpathian Mountains, in Transylvania. Although the artist has been based in much more populous cosmopolitan settings like Bucharest and New York City for several decades, he has regularly traveled back to his hometown, and to many other locations in Romania, for several months a year, not only to spend time with family and friends, but also to make work, mount exhibitions, and examine ever more deeply the terrain and traditions of his places of origin. A sense of quietude and timelessness, and of a nearly unabated resistance to the vicissitudes of history, is a key factor in Gorzo’s interests here, as is a sense of simplicity, humility, and virtuous, intractable belonging.
On a metaphorical level, given the staggering number and variety of objects he has produced, these stalpi come to indicate, inhabit, and possibly haunt a terrestrially familiar, fantastically folkloric, magically mountainous, surreally sylvan setting. Created in a town called Timisoara, and hewn by hand from local timbers and post-structural lengths of wood, these large-scale, totem-like sculptures are painstakingly carved, then vibrantly painted or carefully stained, and they present as both fearsomely imposing and monstrously amiable. They seem to beckon and ward off at once.
BIO
Dumitru Gorzo (b. 1975, Ieud, Maramureș) is one of the most active and prolific contemporary visual artists from Romania. A graduate of the National University of Arts in Bucharest, Painting Department, Gorzo is the co-founder of the Rostopasca group and is known for his multidisciplinary practice that combines painting, sculpture, installation, and public space intervention. He has exhibited extensively both in Romania and internationally — in New York, Paris, Berlin, Vienna, Basel, Brussels, and Dublin — in galleries, museums, and alternative spaces such as SLAG Gallery (New York), RX&SLAG (Paris), MARe, or MNAC.
IOANA GORZO
Hidden in light, revealed in darkness
2018-2023
paintings on transparent plastic
Light plays a crucial role in my ongoing dialogue with the image. I dissect the image, in order to uncover its essence, going beyond apparent reality, in an attempt to explore that intermediate, identity-filled space which holds the memory of what shapes my world.
BIO
Ioana Gorzo (b. 1986, Ieud) lives and works in Bucharest and New York, she has a degree from the Faculty of the Arts, Photo-Video, at the National University of the Arts, Bucharest, Romania, in 2009, and a masters in painting at the Rome Academy of Fine Arts, in Italy. Gorzo's works have been shown in solo and group exhibitions in Romania, Germany, Italy, and the USA.
In Ioana Gorzo's work, drawing and painting are the subterfuge of a more complex process of poetically reflecting on nature's profound simplicity, on the human condition, and on the austerity of the urban landscape, while focusing her practice on key themes, such as light and memory.
While painting figures as a fundamental axis in Gorzo's work, in essence, it serves a pivot point and a touchstone toward an almost performative process of othering and dissolving the conventional image. The subjects she represents are often run through a visualization process that gradually, coldly pulls away, step by step, similar to forgetting or the passing of time. What begins as visible slowly becomes an apparent impression, an emotional reminisce, leaving behind only the sensation of light and transparence.
Resorting to a wide range of technical solutions, home-grown innovations, and to mixed media and forms constructing an image, Gorzo's works develop into a series of witnesses to a radical transition from the figurative to the abstract, from present to apparent, from illusory to concrete.
GREGOR HILDEBRANDT
”Allein, Allein” ”Ich brauche das nicht”
2022 2022
audio cassette tape, acrylic on canvas audio cassette tape, acrylic on canvas
74 x 49 cm 74 x 49 cm
Conceptual, Berlin-based artist Gregor Hildebrandt transforms the near-obsolete relics of recording technology—like VHS, cassettes, and vinyl records—into sculptures, paintings, photographs and installations. To make his signature paintings, Hildebrandt applies tapes directly to the canvas, making impressions with them before finally adhering the cassettes themselves. He is also known to craft massive installations from these materials, including wall-sized “membranes” of extracted recording tape and galleries filled with old vinyl LPs that have been tackily remade into bowls. Though his formal vocabulary draws on minimalist and found-object traditions, Hildebrandt is just as interested in the references to pop culture and nostalgia embedded in the lost recordings. “I really love that there’s something inside the material that you can’t hear,” he says. “And when you see it, you only see black. You can have your own interpretation of the materials and it does something for your experience.”
BIO
Gregor Hildebrandt (b. 1974, Bad Homburg, Germany) lives and works in Berlin. His practice involves the use of audio recording media, such as magnetic tapes and vinyl records, which he records or processes, before incorporating them into canvases, photographic prints, or large scale installations. For Hildebrandt, sound acts as an artistic medium, with its function as a storage space being essential: it enables him to add an “invisible” dimension to his images. The interplay with perception is a key aspect of his work, as the image unfolds and takes shape within the viewer’s mind, ultimately revealing itself. His works are included in prominent public collections worldwide, including the Centre Pompidou in Paris, Berlinische Galerie in Berlin, Saarland Museum in Saarbrücken, Sammlung zeitgenössische Kunst des Bundes in Bonn, Kunstpalast Düsseldorf, Rubell Family Collection in Miami, Vanhaerents Art and Burger Collection in Zurich, CH/Hong Kong, HK, as well as the Budi Tek/Yuz Collection in Shanghai, China, along with numerous prestigious private collections.
ANDREEA ILIE
Raketa Apparat
2025 2025
metal metal, glazed ceramics
60 x 70 x 190 cm 45 x 20 x 5 cm
Frequently abstract, space-age, and industrial, the Soviet playground designs combined the aesthetics of futurism with the ideals of collectivism teaching. These were not neutral spaces. Their shape was predetermined. These structures were experiments in design and function that combined state ideals with avant-garde aesthetics, in contrast to the Western playgrounds that were uniform and safety-driven. A rocket was always more than just a rocket - it was a metallic echo of Sputnik, a promise of cosmic victory. A climbing dome was more than just a pastime - it was a symbol of group cohesion, with each child serving as an individual component of a larger whole. These structures, which were once emblems of innovation and communal joy, now sit in varied states of deterioration, their utopian promise subtly rusted by time.
BIO
Andreea Ilie (b. 2001, Romania) is a visual artist who draws inspiration from the inherent connection between architecture and the human psyche. Her work captures the essence of social buildings and common spaces, emphasizing their profound influence on the modern individual. Through her compositions, she tries to unveil the true purpose of these spaces and underline the vital importance of collective experiences. She believes that the structures and systems of society, including architecture, are not mere entities existing in isolation, but rather intricate products of prevailing economic conditions and social relations. She seeks to combat the profound sense of alienation that can permeate our lives when we feel disconnected from ourselves and others.
ANA IONESCU
I can feel it still II
2025
steel, artificial hair
450 x 20 x 5 cm
This recent series began with investigating and subverting everyday urban structures in relation to identity and spatial experience. By borrowing their aggressive aesthetics and restrictive character, the artist creates hybrid objects that exist in a suspended, timeless environment. The work examines how we navigate the material, especially man-made world. Interested in objects that find themselves in a transitory state between reality and a different otherworldly realm, she aims to find visual satisfaction in chaos through the use of rhythm and symmetry. The sculptures embody an analogy for decision-making: a tension between temptation and fear. They carry a performative aspect that invites viewers to imagine interactions, hinting at a tension that stresses both psychologically and physically. The contrast between the roughness of metal and the permeability of skin highlights this dynamic, being static yet charged, harmless on its own yet dangerous when interacted with.
BIO
Ana Ionescu (b.1999, Bucharest) is a sculptor working and living in London, currently completing her master’s degree in sculpture at the Royal College of Art. She is primarily active in both London and Bucharest. Her practice is deeply rooted in the idea of materiality, its subtleties, but also the curious combinations resulting in the process. Exploring the physical properties and their resonance, she aims to uncover the poetic potential that lies. A recurring motif is the inherent duality of the material world and the attractiveness of two binary opposite elements coexisting. Shape, dimension and ergonomics bring bodily and sculptural matter together. Juxtaposing the previously mentioned and occasionally intertwining them with the abject or fragility, the physical form becomes the manifestation of visual desire.
ALBERT KAAN
device to EXIT FOMO
2022
mixed-media
160 x 50 x 35 cm
Audio-video installation of a 1/10 real life greenhouse located not far away from Bucharest. During lockdown, while being isolated, it became a place, both in my mind and physycal, where I would get myself out of the fear of missing out.The installation provides real time sound interaction with the public, by letting them modulate the frequencies through analog synthesisers. Inside, there is a video of the protagonist doing silly dances and contemplating. In this way there are two main parts of the work, a controlled one where the character inside the greenhouse is continuously dancing (on its own), and a part where the public can set foot in an otherwise private bubble, creating their own soundscape. The work makes a statement about intimacy and public space, isolation and social relationships during lockdown and the time that followed. Moreover, the actual space that was only providing shelter for growing tomatoes at the beginning, took over from being something super personal into a community space that hosts (online) exhibitions off-season
BIO
Albert Kaan is an artist who works across a wide range of forms, from sculpture, installation, drawing to photography, video and performance. His work is both presented locally and internationally in multiple contexts, with a emphasis on working in the public space, the works are often brought into galleries in the form of photographs, videos and objects . His practice relies on the performance of living life and transforming the the artists personal space into a shared playground for the public. Born in Romania a few years after the fall of the Communist Regime, he is currently based in Bucharest and the rural area of Gulia.
HORTENSIA MI KAFCHIN
Meditations / Fear of surgery
2023-2024
oil on wood
80 x 60 cm
" This work was created before my facial feminization surgery, during a time when I was overwhelmed by fear and felt the presence of death watching me closely. The portrait takes the form of a red statue, a symbol of transformation frozen in time, with mountains rising in the background, representing both endurance and isolation. In the darkness behind, death silently observes, while at the bottom lies a sculptor’s chisel, a tool of both creation and destruction.
The piece is, in many ways, a representation of waiting, suspended between what is and what could be, between fear and becoming."
BIO
Hortensia Mi Kafchin was born as the only child of an elementary school teacher and a sound engineer in Galați, Romania, in 1986. This upbringing fostered an early and comprehensive artistic and technological education, encompassing tutelage from various masters in applied arts and religious painting. The rich cultural environment of the Moldavian region also left its mark on Kafchin‘s artistic development. At only eighteen years, she took up formal studies at the University of Art and Design in Cluj-Napoca, specializing in glass and sculpture. Following graduation, her affiliation with the Brush Factory in Cluj further solidified her reputation for imaginative and visionary work, playfully bridging different media and artistic expertise, ranging from traditional panel painting to video art, and eventually even including 3D printing.
Kafchin’s artistic practice is marked by a distinctive synthesis of her Danubian origins and a global, postmodern perspective. Her eclectic and daring style, encompassing dreamlike imagery, technological motifs, futurological concepts, and spiritual themes, has significantly influenced younger generations in Romania and beyond.
SORIN PRODEA
I mentioned...I mentioned Nu-mi amintesc (I don’t remember)
Poate am fost another girlfriend (Maybe I was another girlfriend) you you you you you you we
Stop Stop Stop Stop You did this to us
2025 2025
silver gelatine print each: 38.1 x 27.9 cm frame: silver gelatine print 38.1 x 27.9 cm frame:
50.3 x 103 x 3.4 cm 40.3 x 30 x 4 cm
This series delves into the lingering presence of unsent messages. Using cyanotype and a typewriter, I transformed anonymous submissions into visual traces, each work representing a message. Through layering, accumulation, and the palimpsest, the work touches on how nowadays messages are usually written on screens — most often on phones — where they can be edited and rewritten endlessly. If that same process of erasing and rewriting were to occur in an analog format, the overlaid words would blur, their traces remaining but becoming unreadable. With over forty anonymous messages, the project will ultimately take shape as a self-published zine.between the roughness of metal and the permeability of skin highlights this dynamic, being static yet charged, harmless on its own yet dangerous when interacted with.
BIO
„Born in 1997 in Bucharest, Romania. I live and work in Berlin, Germany. I completed my studies in the UK, earning a BA in Drama, Theatre, and Performance Art from the University of Sussex in Brighton, followed by an MA in Fine Art from Chelsea College of Arts in London. My practice explores traces — the marks and remnants that linger after an action or presence has passed. Each work begins in dialogue with a trace, unfolding through questions of how it might be captured or made visible. I am drawn to what is fragile, fleeting, present, or absent, and to the act of making as a way of attending to these subtleties. Moving across performance, photography, and print, I let form arise from the nature of the trace itself. For me, traces are not merely what remains, but openings — invitations to slow down, look again, and notice what might otherwise go unseen.”
HALEH REDJAIAN
No Flag (10)
No Flag (8)
2025
hand woven carpet, monotype and threads
30 x 40 cm
Once the handwoven textile is returned to the artist, she applies the final stitches of lines and luminous lithograph imprints, the fixed experiment that is developed within the possibility of disorder is complete. In Redjaian’s woven works, a stitch may end differently to what she might have instructed to the weavers.This employs collaborative and chance-driven systems where the weavers work with their own natural dyes, selecting the colours and working within their own set of constraints.
No flag, a series of carpets from 2019, were given their title based on their peculiar likeness to a flag, which the artist was not intending on referencing, hence the playful title, nudging ceci n’est pas un drapeau.
BIO
Haleh Redjaian (b. 1971, Frankfurt/M) lives and works in Berlin. She studied Art History at the Goethe University of Frankfurt and furthered her studies in drawing and printmaking followed by sculpture at the Royal Academy of Fine Art in Antwerp and completed a postgraduate degree in Fine Art from the Higher Institute of Fine Art (HISK)in Belgium.
Redjaian has participated in several group and solo exhibitions including: Heimweh nach neuen Dingen, Kunstmuseum Bonn, Konkrete Frauen, Kunstmuseum Ahlen (2025), In Real Time, NYU AbuDhabi Art Gallery (2024), Haleh Redjaian im Dialog mit Sofie Dawo, Kunsthaus Dahlem (2024), Sehen im Kunstverein Aschaffenburg (2023), My dream never has walls, Duo-Exhibition Fernanda Fragateiro & Haleh Redjaian, Valerie Traan Gallery Antwerpen (2023), Raising Flags, Museum in progress Vienna (2023), The Tide is High, Kunsthaus Wiesbaden (2022), Klangteppich IV Festival, Telegrafie & Klangkunst, TAK, Berlin (2022), L‘année dernièr à Malmaison, SAC Bucharest, (2022), Textile, Haunt Berlin & drj art projects, Berlin (2022), Stasi frenetica, MAO, Turin 2020, White Leaves One and Two on Their Place, Gallery Isabelle van den Eynde, Dubai (2020), Some Things Last A Long Time, Kajetan Berlin (2019), among others.
MIRCEA SUCIU
Study for ‘Disintegration’ (Holy Sinner Series)
2024
oil, acrylic, monotype, canvas
188 x 200 cm
BIO
Mircea Suciu is recognized for his deeply evocative and complex works that explore themes of anxiety, violence, and oppression. Creating using both art-historical and pop-culture references, Suciu has crafted a distinctive visual language where figuration and abstraction converge. His technique is both innovative and meticulous, involving the transfer of photographic images onto canvas, which he then builds upon with layers of acrylic and oil paints. This approach, which he refers to as “monotype,” allows the artist to achieve a nuanced balance between composition, colour, and texture. Suciu’s art resists conventional ideas of a single, unified image, instead embracing a multilayered and often fragmented representation that mirrors the complexities of modern visual culture. Growing up under the pressures of a communist regime, he developed a fascination with the role of images as tools for both manipulation and liberation. His work reflects an ongoing investigation into the power dynamics embedded in visual representation and how imagery influences collective perception.
PHILIP TOPOLOVAC
Aggregat
2008 -2024
Dratge-lecht, Holz, Kunststoff, Foamboard, LED, Lackspray
52 x 56 x 71 cm
Aggregate
Series of installative sculptures; mixed media (e.g. wiremesh, wood, plastic, foamboard, LED, spraypaint), variable sizes; 2008 -2024
This group of works explores the relationship between technology and superstition. The works, which grow out of walls and corners of rooms like nests and holes, seem to have a life of their own. They can be read as defective technical modules, as romantic ruins or as miniature worlds. The series addresses the sometimes paranoid relationship to a technical infrastructure that is omnipresent but barely noticed in everyday life.
BIO
Born in 1979, lives and works in Berlin. From 2001 to 2008 he studied at the Berlin University of the Arts and graduated in 2008 with the title of master student. Since then he has participated in numerous exhibitions in Germany and abroad. Topolovac's sculptures and objects examine the texture of the world while questioning the investigative gaze. Whether the artist is molding landscapes in urban spaces with polyester, finding artifacts on construction sites, or planting technical growths in the corners of rooms, he is always concerned with constructs of reality and our relationship to it.
DAN VEZENTAN
The Transporter No.3
2024
1:10 scale maquette wood, cherry tree wheels, glue, metallic parts
56 x 18 x 56 cm
The Transporter No.3 blends rural heritage with the spirit of technological evolution. Inspired by the traditional Romanian horse-drawn carriage once used to transport people, harvests and resources, it multiplies it and reimagines the symbol of rural labor through precise geometric design. The structure takes on a star-shaped form, a wireframe of connected wooden elements arranged to suggest expandable movement, growth and displacement. Resting on functional wheels, the sculpture can rotate gently, evoking both the motion (travel, migration, scouting) and the passage of time (clock, nature cycles, orbiting around Sun)..
BIO
Dan Vezentan ( b. 1978, Seini ), graduated Bucharest University of Arts, lives and works as an artist and photographer in Bucharest. He explores the zootechnic and agricultural universe, presenting it subjectively, as he recalls his childhood memories. His works stem from the design of households, the animal feeding and watering systems or from the food stocking systems, investigating the production of food, surplus, biological waste and ecology. He grew up in the context of an agriculture-based environment in Maramureș, northern Romania, surrounded by feeding machineries, technical husbandry manuals and animal anatomy books.
JORINDE VOIGT
The Sum
2022
India ink, gold leaf, pastel, oil chalks, graphite on paper, artist's frame
153.5 x 213 x 10 cm
In The Sum (2022), Jorinde continues her personal/subjective compositions-explorations of perceptions/representations as both a visual-spatial and emotional field. It's an immersive cartography and choreography of thoughts, rhythms, tensions, directions, situations and relations, unfolding-interweaving gestures and reflections, light and density, concealments and reveals, accumulations and fragmentations. Similar to paper-like, vulnerable moments of equilibrium between chaos and structure or between cohesions and fractures, we embody them across dynamics, from the macro to the inner-micro.
BIO
Jorinde Voigt (Germany, 1977) is a multidisciplinary visual artist based in Berlin. From 2014 to 2019, she taught at the Akademie der Bildenden Künste in Munich, and today she is Professor of Conceptual Drawing and Painting at the University of Fine Arts in Hamburg.
In her work Voigt observes and explores the inner processes of perception in relation to various aspects and subjects such as affects and emotions, imagination, memory, sensory experience, natural and cultural phenomena, scientific data, interpersonal actions, and relationships. Since her early work, Jorinde Voigt has taken an analytical approach, understanding her subjects as dynamic situations whose state of being is in constant change. Within a conceptual approach Jorinde Voigt has been expanding her work beyond the medium of drawing in recent years, including and experimenting with painterly elements, collage, sculpture, design, and music.