The vibrant, agonizing world of Frida Kahlo has been parsed, packaged, and merchandised to near exhaustion in modern pop culture. Yet, stepping into the current retrospective "Viva Frida" at the Museum of Latin American Art of Buenos Aires (MALBA), one is reminded of why her voice remains so startlingly irreducible. Curated with a commendable blend of historical precision and intimate vulnerability, the exhibition strips away the gloss of "Frida-mania" to lay bare the bone, blood, and brilliant intellect of an artist who transformed personal catastrophe into groundbreaking visual language.

Gathered under the evocative title Passing By, Dana Fabini’s exhibition offers a distinctive experience that unfolds across multiple layers of meaning. It can be read as an autobiographical essay, a confessional poetic-visual discourse resembling an intimate diary, but also as a spatial metaphor for the journey through and towards life — understood as an odyssey of the self, a multifaceted journey of initiation often marked by transitions, existential crises, and moments of profound introspection. Their echoes leave a formative imprint on what we might call the architecture of our becoming and of our search for a place in the world.

Grounded in a feminist-existentialist perspective, in which the lived experience of life and the creative act are inseparably intertwined, the exhibition transforms personal biography into source material for narratives with universal resonance. It thus becomes a space for reflection and an encounter with the invisible topography of the inner self, ultimately offering a sensitive meditation on the complexity of the human condition and the existential dilemmas that accompany it.

Through a selection spanning diverse media, periods, and modes of expression, the works brought together in the exhibition map essential stages and directions within Fabini’s artistic practice, revealing the transformations, continuities, and explorations that have shaped her creative process.

For Dana Fabini, the creative act always carries a dual meaning. It is understood both as a profound spiritual experience and as a form of healing and survival. In this sense, it also becomes a way of anchoring oneself in the present, allowing us, beyond the artist as author, to glimpse the human being — and, through her, the humanity that each of us carries within.

Alexandra Sârbu, excerpt from the curatorial text

Artist’s Statement

"My life has always unfolded somewhere between reality and fiction, like a nebulous cloud.

When I was young, I dreamed of living by the sea or the ocean. The boundlessness of the water, with its ever-changing shades in every wave, awakened in me a longing for love and travel. Only much later did I discover the stillness of the mountains. Their majestic heights seemed to heal all that longing; when I look at them, I live fully in the immediate present, without projections of the imagination. And I understand that life can be entirely (un)serious.

Its experiences repeat themselves until I find the inner peace I need."

The exhibition is open to the public until September 27, 2026, at the Cluj-Napoca Art Museum.

Photo Credit: Feleki István

Stepping into “Curada de espanto” (Cured of Fright) at the Museum of Contemporary Art of Buenos Aires (MACBA) feels less like entering a museum gallery and more like eavesdropping on a secret ceremony long after the participants have fled. In her debut solo museum exhibition, Porteña painter Ornella Pocetti offers a seductive, unsettling dive into a world ruled by suspicion, uncanny femininity, and psychological tension.

Ornella Pocetti at MACBA

The exhibition’s title—a colloquial Argentine phrase translating roughly to "cured of fright" or hardened against fear—carries an immediate irony. Pocetti’s canvases do not celebrate immunity to horror; rather, they dissect the scars left behind by trauma and desire. Her figures, mostly women rendered with lush, velvety brushwork, exist in a realm of perpetual limbo. Turned away from the viewer or half-submerged in eerie, twilight landscapes, they seem caught between waiting for an impending catastrophe and reckoning with one that has already transpired.

Pocetti’s technical dexterity shines in how she handles surface and light. High heels, bare skin, serpentine shapes, and heavy iron framing elements coexist within compositions that borrow as much from 19th-century Symbolism and Latin American magical realism as they do from contemporary cinematic framing. Her palettes—deep, bruised purples, sickly greens, and flashes of hyper-saturated hues—create an oppressive intimacy that draws you in while warning you to stay back. The lingering presence of the snake, appearing across several works as both an omen of betrayal and a symbol of shed skin, acts as a master key to the show's underlying motif: transformation through exposure to the strange.