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