A new contemporary art exhibition invites audiences to reconsider the relationship between humans and the natural environment, placing bodily perception and affective memory at the center of the experience.

Created by Portuguese artist Ânia Pais, Shadows of the Landscape is on view at Contemporar from 9 December 2025 to 31 January 2026. The exhibition, curated by Gabriela Moldovan, is part of the international residency programme Studiotopia, organised by the Cluj Cultural Centre (CCC) within Challenge #3: If We Opened People Up, We’d Find Landscapes.

Developed through a year-long research process, the project emerged from a transdisciplinary collaboration between the artist and Tibor Hartel, a scientist specialising in ecology and conservation. Together, they explored how landscapes function not only as physical settings but as experiences that linger in the body and memory, shaping identity and emotional perception.

Rather than presenting landscape as a visual image or backdrop, Shadows of the Landscape approaches it as a living presence—one that continues to resonate even in absence. The works operate less as representations and more as spaces for sensory inhabitation, inviting viewers into a reflective relationship with matter, time, and place.

The first installation is rooted in an archaic and deeply collective gesture: the ritual of haymaking. Working with straw and clay, primary and ephemeral materials, the artist reactivates a form of embodied knowledge transmitted through labour and community. The straw, gathered together with her father from a field in her hometown, becomes a visual and emotional language—an extension of shared work, time, and intergenerational memory.

Comprising three sculptural elements made of straw and terracotta, the installation appears suspended between sky and earth, evoking the natural cycles of existence and the idea of return: everything that comes from the land ultimately returns to it, in an inevitable yet deeply reconciling process.

The second installation draws inspiration from an island on Lake Chios—visible yet inaccessible. Conceived as a space that can be observed but not touched, the work proposes an alternative mode of relating to landscape. Here, distance does not signal disconnection, but rather respect, contemplation, and humility, acknowledging that certain places and forms of knowledge retain their power precisely through inaccessibility.

Overall, Shadows of the Landscape is a sensitive meditation on belonging, memory, and humanity’s relationship with the land—a dialogue between materiality and absence, proximity and distance, between what can be touched and what can only be contemplated.

Photo credits and info - CCC