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.