The retrospective Mi corazón es un imán 1992–2025 (My heart is a magnet) by Fernanda Laguna at MALBA unfolds as both an archive and an affective landscape, resisting the conventional logic of institutional display. Rather than imposing a linear narrative, the exhibition (curated by Miguel A. López) embraces dispersion, intimacy, and accumulation, bringing together around 200 works produced over three decades. Paintings, drawings, collages, textiles, installations, writings, and personal documents coexist without hierarchy, foregrounding Laguna’s refusal to separate art from life.

MALBA

Laguna’s practice has long been described as “indisciplinary,” moving fluidly between visual art, literature, activism, and self-managed cultural initiatives. This exhibition makes that hybridity tangible: handwritten notes appear alongside fragile objects; decorative motifs coexist with urgent political gestures. The result is less a retrospective in the traditional sense than a porous constellation of gestures, where the personal becomes a mode of collective address.

What emerges most forcefully is Laguna’s sustained commitment to the everyday. Her aesthetic, often associated with precarious materials, informal mark-making, and a deliberately “naïve” visual language, operates as a critical position within the history of Argentine contemporary art. Hearts, phrases, and modest surfaces function not as decorative excess but as magnetic points of affect, drawing the viewer into an unstable field between tenderness and discomfort.

At the Art Museum in Brașov (RO), a new photography project invites the public to reflect and to take a closer look at things that usually escape the hurried gaze. Titled “What Remains Is What We Do Not See,” the exhibition brings together works by artists Ștefan Bădulescu, Nicola Vinci, and Marcello Grassi, curated by Liviu Bulea. The event is organized by the Art Museum in Brașov in partnership with IAGA Contemporary Art.

A Space for Introspection

“What Remains Is What We Do Not See” proposes a reflection on the invisible dimensions of reality. Through images filled with symbols, silences, and subtle suggestions, photography becomes more than a documentary tool; it becomes a language of memory, introspection, and a timeless inner search.

Although they come from different cultural contexts and employ distinct visual vocabularies, the three artists construct together a coherent discourse about human experience and what lies beyond appearances. Their works investigate the subtle layers of reality—those inner spaces, emotions, and symbolic echoes that persist beyond the immediate image.

An Invitation to Slow Down

The exhibition unfolds like a quiet visual symphony, in which each photograph becomes a gateway to reflection. The images offer encounters with forgotten spaces, inner states, and fragments of collective or personal memory. In this context, viewers are invited to slow down the usual pace of visiting an exhibition and allow themselves to be absorbed by the evocative atmosphere of the works.

More than a simple visual experience, the exhibition becomes a silent dialogue between image and viewer, in which meanings gradually emerge through contemplation and personal interpretation.

The Artists

Romanian artist Ștefan Bădulescu (b. 1983, Vatra Dornei) is a visual artist, university lecturer, and PhD in Visual Arts. His practice explores the human condition through symbolic portraits in which identity and presence become instruments for reflecting on emotion and introspection.

Italian artist Nicola Vinci (b. 1975, Castellaneta) works with staged and documentary photography to analyze the boundaries between intimate emotion and the individual’s public image. His projects investigate the relationship between the self and the other, while developing the concept of “inner landscapes,” symbolic spaces of psychological experience.

Similarly, Marcello Grassi (b. 1960, Reggio Emilia) explores the relationship between time, memory, and material culture. His photographs—often inspired by archaeology, museums, or historical objects—investigate the tension between reality and symbol, between presence and absence.

The Curator

The curator of the exhibition, Liviu Bulea (b. 1989, Turda), is a visual artist, curator, and cultural manager active in Cluj-Napoca. His practice lies at the intersection of art, memory, and cultural activism, exploring how collective narratives shape the spaces in which we live. Through photography, video, text, and installation, he recovers forgotten objects, neglected places, and marginalized stories, recontextualizing them within a contemporary artistic discourse.

By bringing together these three distinct artistic voices, the exhibition “What Remains Is What We Do Not See” offers the public a contemplative experience about memory, identity, and those subtle meanings that continue to exist even when they are not visible.

Opened on February 27, 2026, the exhibition will be on view until April 9, 2026, in the ground-floor exhibition space of the museum, located on Bulevardul Eroilor 21. The exhibition can be visited Tuesday to Sunday, from 09:00 to 17:00.

Photo credits: MAB

When one steps into Glaciares Andinos ("Andean Glaciers") at the French Alliance in Buenos Aires, the first impression is of an exhibition that refuses to settle for picturesque postcard views of the Andes. Curated around the visionary work of French photographer Nicolas Villaume, this multimedia installation deploys photography, video and virtual reality not simply as documentation, but as an aesthetic strategy to unsettle and provoke.

The photographic sequences, printed with meticulous attention to tonal range and texture, map the Andean cryosphere with a quiet insistence. Snow and shadow form landscapes that are at once grand and precarious; these are places where beauty and loss cohabit, and Villaume’s lens seems attuned to that tension. But it is in the VR stations where Glaciares Andinos reveals its most ambitious claim: here, the viewer is compelled into an embodied encounter with these high-altitude worlds. One hovers above the Quelccaya ice field, the largest tropical glacier on Earth, not as a bystander, but in a liminal state between awe and disquiet.

A space defined by constant movement, Iași International Airport becomes the host of an artistic installation designed to pause travelers in transit — if only for a few moments — and offer them a subject for reflection. The installation Freedom, created by visual artist Radu Carnariu and presented through a partnership between Galeria Artep, Romanian Creative Week, and Iași Airport, introduces a critical intervention into a place where movement is simultaneously free and regulated.

The work — an oversized straitjacket made from reclaimed vintage school maps — does not offer simple answers. Instead, it proposes a conceptual experience that invites reflection on the contemporary paradox of freedom. Strategically positioned in the Departures area, just before the security checkpoint, the installation functions as a symbolic threshold between the promise of global mobility and the institutional systems that manage it.

The Artist and His Critical Discourse

Radu Carnariu is a multidisciplinary visual artist trained at the “George Enescu” National University of Arts in Iași, known for projects that investigate the social, political, and cognitive impact of critical art on collective behavior and imagination. His artistic practice frequently relies on paradox, visual subversion, and irony, employing installation, object-based work, collage, and multimedia interventions to challenge the audience’s mechanisms of perception.

Throughout his projects, Carnariu has consistently explored the tension between freedom and constraint, between dominant narratives and the personal experience of social reality. Exhibitions such as Under Constriction and Homo Electus addressed themes including excessive consumerism, political pressure, media manipulation, and the fragility of perception in a hyperconnected world.

Within this context, Freedom emerges not as an isolated gesture but as a natural continuation of an artistic practice concerned with how contemporary society negotiates the idea of freedom in an era shaped by globalization and surveillance.

The Object as Political Metaphor

The primary material of the work — reclaimed school maps — introduces both a historical and educational dimension. Traditionally symbols of orientation and exploration, the maps become the raw material of a structure associated with restriction and control. Through this inversion, Carnariu transforms an object of knowledge into a conceptual instrument that questions the boundaries of contemporary freedom.

The metaphor is intensified by the exaggerated scale of the straitjacket, suggesting that mechanisms of control are not merely individual but systemic and collective. At the same time, the installation’s placement within an airport — a quintessential symbol of globalization — foregrounds the contradiction between mobility and security, between access and filtering.

The Airport as Exhibition Space

The presence of contemporary art in airports is not accidental. In recent years, Iași International Airport has become a meeting point between the general public and artistic projects developed within Romanian Creative Week, one of the most significant events dedicated to creative industries in Europe.

Such interventions expand the exhibition space beyond traditional galleries and introduce art into the everyday rhythm of the city, where it encounters a diverse audience — tourists, migrants, students, business travelers, and local residents in transit.

An Open Question

Freedom does not deliver a moral verdict but rather creates a framework for reflection. The questions raised by the artist — concerning the cost of freedom, its duration, and the mechanisms that control it — become part of the traveler’s experience. Instead of offering a single, definitive message, the work opens a space of ambiguity in which viewers project their own beliefs about liberty, security, and responsibility.

In this sense, the installation functions as a conceptual pause before departure — a moment of awareness within a space dominated by speed and procedure. It transforms the airport into a site of reflection and reaffirms the role of contemporary art as a critical intervention in social reality.

Photo credit: Galeria Artep

Stepping into José Franco. Génesis at the National Museum of Fine Arts in Buenos Aires feels less like entering a conventional retrospective and more like traversing a living archive of an artist in continuous metamorphosis. Curated by Mariana Marchesi, the exhibition gathers 25 paintings, drawings, objects, and installations spanning from the 1980s to works produced as recently as 2025, offering an expansive yet cohesive survey of Franco’s practice.

From the outset, the show resists a purely chronological reading. Early canvases reveal Franco’s fascination with pattern and surface, where graphic echoes of animal pelage emerge in a style that oscillates between pop sensibility and organic exuberance. These works, dense with visual rhythms, set the tone for a career attuned to tensions between appearance and essence, camouflage and revelation.

Uj Kriterion Gallery in Miercurea Ciuc (Harghita county, RO) presents the exhibition project Gendered Blood by artist Magdalena Pelmuș, bringing together drawings, video works, and installations made of and with beads.

The exhibition unfolds as a reflection on ambivalence, emerging from the very core of corporeal materiality: “When the line of separation and differentiation collapses, the pleasant fluidity that results from or accompanies the entire process of such a liquid deconstruction is inevitably ambivalent,” curator Adriana Oprea emphasizes. The exhibition foregrounds a consciously assumed state of instability, in which borders no longer function as secure demarcations, but rather as zones of transition.

This logic of fluidity is evident in the series Fragile Anatomy, as the artist calls it, where “frontiers and limits between things and reality give way to something indeterminate, polysemantic, indecisive, and uncertain.” The exhibited objects—weapons, organs, and tissues—are charged with a tension that makes them constantly oscillate between attraction and repulsion.

Within this visual universe, violence is not frontal but masked: “perfectly camouflaged and glossy like luxury embroidery, they are turned against themselves.” Delicacy becomes a filter through which cruelty is softened, and “the implicit force and brutality are mitigated through grace and refinement.”

The body appears as the central space of this symbolic negotiation: “what is cheap— the body, vital tissues, life, blood as common, base realities— becomes associated with an expensive, refined delicacy.” Anatomy is thus transformed into a disturbing jewel, where “strict biology is presented as a troubling piece of jewelry.”

The objects and materials used retain their ambiguous character: “non-uniform and imperfect, restless and confusingly dim-glossy.” They coherently extend the trajectory developed in performances and films, where “subversively stitched” and “sloppy-crafted” function as aesthetic strategies that destabilize expectations.

Attraction and repulsion constantly coexist: “organic membranes can be ‘precious’ and immediately provoke fear and attraction, touch and dissociation.” Thread and beads are not mere ornaments, but “tools and media for the same semantic and affective ambiguity.”

Blood, a recurring element, carries multiple meanings: “blood metaphorizes the body as a wound,” but also as a symbol of life and power. In Fragile Anatomy, “maternal blood flows and envelops paternal weapons,” generating a dynamic of opposition and simultaneous fusion.

Gender differentiation, life and death, vulnerability and strength are compressed into a single reality: “the differentiation between genders and between life and death is not simple (both the female body and the wounded body bleed).” The female body thus becomes a space of tension, but also of power.

In the end, the exhibition reclaims the archaic and symbolic meaning of weapons and blood: “the color of life and power pigments blood as the ancestral vehicle and seat of the soul.” The message is not one of violent confrontation, but of lucidity: “Magdalena Pelmuș’s gilded weapons and anatomies, with bead-blood streaming over them, do not seek to be a violent battle cry, but rather a snapshot of tenderness,” as the curatorial text concludes.

In a season marked by ambitious museum programming in Buenos Aires, Pop Brasil: Avant-garde and New Figuration, 1960s–70s arrives at MALBA as more than a historical survey: it is a potent reframing of Brazilian artistic resistance under the shadow of military rule.