Two striking sculptural forms have recently appeared in the public space of Brno, inviting passers-by to stop, look closer and reconsider the relationship between contemporary art, architecture and the city.

Foreign Star I and Foreign Star II, created by Czech sculptor Jan Dostal, have the appearance of monumental three-dimensional stars, yet their visual complexity is rooted in a remarkably precise geometric structure. Installed at Šilingrovo náměstí, in the Galerie Šilingrák space managed by the Brno-střed municipal district and Kávéeska, the two works bring a distinctive sculptural presence to the urban environment.

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At first glance, their intricate surfaces may seem almost organic, resembling crystalline structures, intricate webs or fragments of some otherworldly architecture. Yet beneath this visual complexity lies a highly ordered geometric form: the icosahedron, one of the five Platonic solids.

An icosahedron is a three-dimensional shape composed of 12 vertices and 20 triangular faces. Alongside its mathematical precision, the form has acquired a rich symbolic significance throughout history, often associated with concepts such as perfection, harmony and balance.

This intersection between mathematics, philosophy and art is central to the visual power of Foreign Star. The sculptures transform an abstract geometric principle into something monumental and tangible, allowing a form traditionally encountered through mathematics to be experienced physically within the city.

Photo by Cosmina Marcela Oltean

Together, Foreign Star I and Foreign Star II weigh approximately 300 kilograms, giving the works a substantial physical presence despite the apparent intricacy and openness of their structures. Their surfaces are composed of repeated geometric elements, creating an effect that changes depending on the viewer's position. From one angle, the sculptures appear solid and monumental; from another, their complex structures open up, allowing glimpses of the surrounding architecture, trees and sky.

This changing perception is an important part of the experience. The sculptures do not exist independently of their surroundings. Instead, the city becomes part of the work: buildings, light, vegetation, movement and the people passing through the square are constantly reflected, framed or visually incorporated into the geometric structures. The result is a dialogue between order and environment, mathematical precision and organic surroundings.

Photo by Cosmina Marcela Oltean

The use of the icosahedron gives Foreign Star an additional conceptual dimension. The Platonic solids have fascinated mathematicians, philosophers and artists for centuries precisely because of their exceptional symmetry and structural harmony. By choosing one of these forms as the basis for a monumental public sculpture, Jan Dostal brings a mathematical idea into direct contact with everyday urban experience. The sculptures invite viewers to encounter geometry not through formulas or diagrams, but through scale, material, light and space.

There is also something intriguing about the title itself. Calling these geometric forms Foreign Stars introduces a sense of distance and mystery. Their unusual appearance makes them seem almost extraterrestrial — objects that have arrived from another world and found their place among the familiar architecture of Brno. Yet they are built upon one of the most fundamental principles of geometric order.

Photo by Cosmina Marcela Oltean

Public art can alter the way a familiar place is perceived. A square that might otherwise function simply as a passageway or meeting point can become a destination in itself when a striking artistic intervention changes its visual identity. At Šilingrovo náměstí, Foreign Star I and Foreign Star II create precisely such a moment. Their scale encourages viewers to approach them, while their intricate structures reward closer observation. Seen from a distance, they establish a powerful silhouette; experienced up close, they reveal layers of geometry, texture and spatial relationships.

The two sculptures also demonstrate how contemporary art can bring together seemingly distant fields — mathematics, philosophy, sculpture and urban life — in a single visual experience. The icosahedron may symbolize perfection, harmony and balance, but in the public space of Brno it becomes something more immediate: an invitation to look, explore and discover how an abstract form can acquire a new life through art.

Foreign Star I and Foreign Star II are not simply objects placed in the city. They become part of its visual rhythm — two unusual geometric presences encouraging us to pause and see the familiar urban landscape from a different perspective. Inspired by the writings of Plato, this geometric form symbolizes perfection, universal harmony, and balance.

Sun Tunnels - installation by Nancy Holt

• Nancy Holt, Sun Tunnels (1973–1976), Holt/Smithson Foundation: https://holtsmithsonfoundation.org/sun-tunnels

• James Nisbet, Ecologies, Environments, and Energy Systems in Art of the 1960s and 1970s, MIT Press, 2014.

• Olafur Eliasson, Long Daylight Pavilion, HAM Helsinki Art Museum: https://www.hamhelsinki.fi/en/sculptures/long-daylight-pavilion

• Charles Ross, Star Axis: https://www.staraxis.org

• United States Naval Observatory, “Astronomical Applications: Solstices and Equinoxes”: https://aa.usno.navy.mil

• Encyclopaedia Britannica, “Summer Solstice”: https://www.britannica.com/science/summer-solstice

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

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.

 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