Who Knows When We’ll Need It

01.10 - 24.10.2026
/SAC Berthelot

Collaborative exhibition by: Cătălin Angelescu, Sebastian Antal, Alexandra Baranyi, Diana Dobrovăț, Andreea Drăgan, Iulia Hulea, Sebastian Iosub, Bianca Ivan, Jamal Louis Kareem, Paul Petrar, Ana Popa, Alex Roceanu, Ileana Stanciu Scripcariu, Cătălina Ungureanu.

Following workshops with: Maria Balabaș, Justin Baroncea, Irina Botea Bucan, Nicolae Comănescu, Maria Ghement, Dumitru Gorzo, Ioana Marchidan, Rucsandra Pop, Alex Radu.

Production assistance: Iulian Cristea, Alex Rîță, Răzvan Țurcanu.

The exhibition is open from October 1 to October 24, Thursday to Saturday, from 4 to 8 PM.

What happens when you can't let go of objects?

This is the question from which this collaborative exhibition installation, conceived by 14 Gen Z artists, emerged. Starting from a shared feeling of being oversaturated with possessions, we began looking into the past, among memories, gestures, and inherited habits, discovering our own extensions in the objects around us.

The resulting project is a hybrid one: artistic research, anthropological investigation, and theoretical explorations of the tendency to recover / preserve / collect things.

“Raised in the accelerated rhythm of a progress that dictates a single image of the future, trapped in accumulations increasingly dense in space and time, yet increasingly diluted in meaning, we have begun to approach, both globally and individually, an existential exhaustion. This recurring sense of the crisis of a continuous ending, triggered by experiences of loss (of communities, infrastructures, assurances) and by the tensions of the present political-economic situation, has accustomed us to living with precarity. In such a climate, we have come to find refuge and control in the objects we can keep, as extensions of our own selves.

The tendency medically classified under the term "hoarding" (a persistent difficulty in throwing away or letting go of objects, regardless of their actual value) was only recently catalogued as a psychiatric disorder. Our artistic approach takes a critical stance toward its pathologization, shifting the emphasis from its psychological meanings to the "relational materiality" of object collections and the various conceptual trajectories that emerge from it.

Our process took as its starting point the idea of testing, or, for some of us, of deepening, this habit of collecting things, using the exhibition space as a storage room/ cabinet of curiosities / shared studio. Over the past few months, we have lived daily alongside the recovered objects, which, over time, have generated new spatial pathways, working routines, and affective repositionings in relation to (in)visible inheritances, all translated into the final exhibition.”

“Who Knows When We’ll Need It” is an exhibition produced as part of the /ZAC @ Berthelot mentorship program, initiated and organized by /SAC (Contemporary Art Space) and co-funded by the Administration of the National Cultural Fund. The program does not necessarily represent the position of the Administration of the National Cultural Fund. The Administration of the National Cultural Fund is not responsible for the content of the program or for the way in which the program’s results may be used. Full responsibility lies with the recipient of the funding.

/SAC is an independent, private, non-profit initiative conceived as an alternative both to the commercial art system and to the public institutional one. Its aim is to (re)contextualize and historically update contemporary independent artistic practices through resources and strategies that facilitate a direct dialogue between artists and the public. Operating as a platform for organization, production, and dissemination in the service of artists, /SAC brings together the functions of Exhibition, Research, and Communication within a transdisciplinary interface for artistic and curatorial collaboration.