"Al Rojo Vivo" (In The Red) is a solo exhibition by Renata Schussheim that reconstructs the 50 years of the Argentine artist's work. The proposal curated by Romina Del Prete has a multidisciplinary and transversal approach based on the crossing of plastic, scenic, and visual arts, music, and rock that takes place at the Centro Cultural Recoleta.

Galeria Aparte (UNAGE Iași, Romania) presented the project "The story that could have been" (August 10-16, 2023), which included works signed by Oana Maria Nae, Ioana Păvăleanu (doctor) and Horia Ioachim Nae. In the current project, Oana Maria Nae is an artist-curator, responsible for both the exhibition concept and the artistic content and process. The exhibition is the story of a personal journey, from which the artist-curator extracted and then combined the practical and theoretical aspects of her own story and interaction with art over the years.

"Started as an intimate approach, an opportunity to reminisce and reactivate a personal creative process, the present exhibition becomes a support for the idea of the potentiality of an artistic career that did not happen", we learn from the curator. Oana Maria Nae is currently an art historian focusing on the area of modern art theory and modern design. However, several years ago she had a training in the field of visual arts, working with various artistic concepts and techniques. The exhibition consists of a fragmentary collage made of sketches, texts, works with various themes that Oana Maria Nae made from primary school to the period of her MA studies (approx. between 1990-2008). "Added to these are active and current process of self-analysis based on the temporal distance from that period. The period between the possible beginning of an artistic career and the present dominated by other concerns, professional or domestic, becomes a time in which the ability and freedom to choose, submission to choices and their acceptance, subtly transforms into a mechanism of regulation and understanding of the balance between reality and potentiality", Oana Maria Nae also conveys.

An obvious feminist reading of this artistic act is brought by the roles that Oana Maria Nae assumes and exhibits on this background. As a real echo of these ideas, several artworks made by Ioana Păvăleanu, a doctor, and Horia Ioachim Nae are brought to the exhibition, works that outline other creative potentialities, one of an amateur and the other of a child in training, which can be extinguished or, on the contrary, may increase or continue to exist.

"<<The story that could have been>> is an self-analysis exhibition of the creative process in its temporal evolution, signed by Oana Maria Nae, art historian, with an undeniable talent, enhanced by years of professional academic education. She could have been a visual artist - her cultivated talent fully recommends her, but her analytical spirit and pedagogic vocation opened other doors for her and it was not to be. The parable of the choices we make that shape or at least influence our professional destiny is obvious. But the humor, the self-irony, the appetite for mixed media and the collaborative text-image message are also remarkable. I also appreciated a nice nod to the passing of the years, with two guest artists - a transgenerational collaboration with Horia Ioachim Nae (in training) and a tribute to a friend in art, Ioana Păvăleanu, who finally chose medicine as a profession” - Cristina Simion, gallerist and curator at Tiny Griffon Gallery Nürnberg.

Oana Maria Nicuță Nae teaches modern and contemporary art courses at “George Enescu” National University of Art in Iasi. She is interested in the representation of women in modern Romanian painting, but also in the relationship between Orientalism and Westernism in modern art. She experienced the process of artistic creation for several years, especially the techniques of decorative art, being a graduate of the Mural Art specialization (2006) and participating in various exhibitions and collective artistic projects (2002-2008). She also created two mural art projects in Iasi (2002, 2006) and graphically illustrated the book "A super, mega, extra journey in the world of sleep" (ed. Sedcom Libris, 2022).

"Tecnopoéticas ambientales" (Environmental Technopoetics), "Trazos Biomateriales" (Biomaterials and Raw ) and "Materia Prima" (Material Traces) are three group exhibitions by Argentine artists that mix art, science, and technology to make visitors reflect on how to take care of the planet. These proposals are part of the "Shared Planet" project, a campaign that focuses on the behaviors and ways in which the planet is inhabited, carried out at the Recoleta Cultural Center.

On the one hand, "Tecnopoéticas ambientales" exhibits six projects by different artists, winners of the public calls of the MediaLab program of the Centro Cultural de España en Buenos Aires (Cceba). This program seeks to support the generation of works by artists based in Argentina, stimulate research and be a space for production, reflection, and training in art, in intersection with science and technology.

The exhibition takes place in three halls. The works explore different media, supports, and techniques. We can find sound installation, electronic textiles, electro-luminescent intervention, video games, immersive environments, holography, and blown glass objects, designed and produced by 3D printing techniques.

Thus, all the works exhibited participate in some of the technopoetic strategies deployed within the field of contemporary art. I refer, for example, to the hierarchization of the research processes on the idea of the finished piece, the questioning of the strictly objectual dimension of the traditional work, and the confluences of tangible and non-apprehensible materialities.

In these exhibitions, Centro Cultural Recoleta also seeks gender equity among the selected artists. The creations presented here thus contribute to the AGENDA 2030 approved by all member states at the 2015 UN General Assembly.

"Tecnopoéticas ambientales"/ "Trazos Biomateriales"/ "Materia Prima" 

November 8-30, 2022 / at the GreenHouse, St. Atanasie Street no. 25, Iasi 

“Between Two Wars” is a project that presents 8 new artistic productions by artists established and active in Eastern Europe.

The initiative to bring these works together in a group exhibition in Iasi is based on the orientation of the organizer towards local artists in a regional framework (Eastern Romania, Czech Republic, Republic of Moldova) through the production of contemporary art organically realized for this exhibition. The project was named after the film “Between Two Wars” by filmmaker Harun Farocki, completed in 1978.

"The works are conceptually indirectly aiming at the conflict that recently started on Romania's border, and rather show different mechanisms of perception on it, but also aspects of the political and economic consequences in countries located in the proximity of the war, as felt by the artists in the places where they live and activate.

The exhibition thus outlines an artistic production made in a period defined by a constant expectative, in an attempt to responsibly and reflexively integrate current global issues, and not to deeply destabilize existing local cultural structures and efforts to gain a better understanding of the situation we are in", we learn from curator Delia Bulgaru.

The exhibition, co-financed by the National Cultural Fund Administration, is part of the cultural project BETWEEN TWO WARS, organized by satelit between August and November 2022.

Silvia Amancei & Bogdan Armanu (RO): Rendered Hopeless, 2022

Florin Bobu (RO): BIИE AȚI VEИIT!, 2022

Elena Chirila (MD): The war beyond my social media feeds: near or far?, 2022

Andreea Cioară (RO): unwelcome, 2022

Cezar Lăzărescu (RO): Memories, 2022

Andrei Timofte (RO): Vibrant Democracies: From passion to profit, 2022

Smaranda Ursuleanu (RO): alternative drawings, 2022

Viktor Vejvoda (CZ): Pohlednice z minulosti a budoucnosti / Postcards from past and future, 2022

The Artists Union from Romania - Iași Branch and Galeria Dana present, between October 11 and November 11, the exhibition "Retroactiv" - signed by artist Ion ANGHEL. The project is curated by Smaranda Bostan and the art critic Dr. Maria Bilasevschi.

Ion Anghel is a visual artist, curator and lecturer at the Department of Painting at the University of Arts in Bucharest. A member of the UAP, within which he holds the position of President of Honor, Discipline and Arbitration Commission, Ion Anghel has been awarded with numerous prizes, being, at the same time, the author of important exhibitions held at museums and galleries throughout Romania.

"In the interstice of space-time, Ion Anghel's artistic approach within Retroactiv project does not propose a visual formula under the warmth of which understanding develops, hence the viewer's self-satisfaction, but insinuates itself into everyone's capacity for active decoding and reactive vigilance. Installation, object, sculpture, assemblage, painting, each work transcends its own personal history in the face of learned history through re-signification and contextualization. The extraordinary character of the "ordinary" that exists in found objects, saved from their own loss under the curtain of everyday indifference, outlines the often unseen substratum of the feeling you have, upon first contact, with the artist's objects, assemblages and collages.

Finding the thematic becomes secondary, in fact finding a narrative thread or an explicit statement is not justified, the viewer being invited to go beyond the immediate meaning of the fragment towards the surprise, even partial allusion. Of course, viewed without understanding the playful-ironic dimension, translated with a bittersweet feeling that remains fixed behind the retina, the intellectual-emotional resonance would be diluted towards a formalist dialogue with a enigmatic intimacy. By reassembling the elements and materials that constitute individual allegories, the creation process intuited in the final form seems similar to that of an alchemist. In fact, the re-evaluation of the object's status, which results from the artist's relationship with it, endowing it with a new destiny that erases the past and mirrors the future is, in the whole exhibition, a re-examination, an aesthetic and conceptual re-evaluation of the paradigms of art which become a metaphor for life itself. 

Precisely for this reason, disillusionment, derision, the volatility of cultural or spiritual value systems, the lessons of history, the lessons of art (the pseudo-idyllic landscape in the portrait), the lesson about human being, become through two and three dimensions a journey towards the personal archeology of artist Ion Anghel", we learn from art critic Maria Bilashevschi.

"El Gran Manto" by Ricardo Migliorisi

The history of Paraguay has always been crossed by weaving. Aó, a Guaraní word, refers to textiles in all their formats, from clothing to ornaments, including quilts and tapestries. "Paraguayan folk weavings tell the stories of the people who make them (mostly women) and use them in the domestic or work environment," said Lía Colombino, curator and director of the Museo del Barro's Museum of Indigenous Art.

Throughout the exhibition, the artists address central topics such as the role of women, work, readings of the conquest, popular art, and traditional knowledge through contemporary art. The works of Claudia Casarino, Mónica Millán, Arnaldo Cristaldo, Félix Cardozo and Joaquín Sánchez recover embroidery, lace and traditional fabrics to make women's labor emancipation visible.

"Sí, quería" by Joaquín Sánchez

The works of Marcos Benítez and Karina Yaluk use textiles as a weft to which plant or animal traces are attached. Meanwhile, in the center of the room, Ricardo Migliorisi's "El Gran Manto" (The great mantle) captures the viewers' attention due to its enormous size. It is a 12-meter-long patchwork made up of gobelins, which are carpets of French origin that reveal how tradition has been crossed by colonization. The pieces were intervened with texts from an inaccurate web translator, as a sort of textual and textile Babel.

The artists Osvaldo Salerno and Feliciano Centurión detach themselves from the locals also in terms of tradition, but to remember the domesticity of the sewing machines or the massively used blankets, so close to their histories. Salerno, brings up the language, that other clothing that dresses us; and Centurión, embark on small stories of affection.

Feliciano Centurión

The exhibition "Aó: Textile Episodes of the Visual Arts in Paraguay" is an invitation to delve into Paraguay's art scene, as well as its history and, therefore, the working material of its artists. A common axis throughout the tour is the conception of weaving as writing and the overflowing of stories as a critical activity necessary to think a territory.

The purpose of the project revolved around the need to preserve crafts and promote traditional culture through contemporary art, this project putting a local craft in the foreground.

"The charcoal makers from Lupeni (Farkaslaka) Harghita county have a tradition of over three centuries. Generations have taken care of this craft, by which they produce mangal - charcoal from burnt hardwood. Thick wooden branches are cut and built into huge cones, called bushes, then covered with sand and earth, after which a smoldering, flameless burn takes place in the absence of oxygen for nearly two weeks. As a result of this burning, the carbonization of the wood occurs.

Finally, the coal thus obtained is crushed, packed in paper bags and sold. The beneficiaries are all of us, when we light these coals on the grills, to fry various goodies. Recently, technology has been imposed in this field as well, with wood charcoal being obtained in special furnaces. There are only a few genuine charcoal burners left in the area who still practice this craft. Like other jobs, this risks being forgotten too. Within this camp, we set out to value of charcoal in the most noble way possible, namely to be used in drawing and other artistic techniques by contemporary artists. Thus, the work of art obtained with a few grams of coal can be worth as much as the equivalent of tens of kilograms of coal. Another approach to the theme was the representation of charring through other artistic techniques. So - with or without coal, but about coaling - it became the motto of the camp...", said Lucian Muntean, camp coordinator.

At the first edition of the project, a group of 6 artists were invited to take part in "a creative camp where they documented the activity of the coal miners, visited the cultural and historical sites in the area, then created a series of contemporary art works, using locally produced coal as a working material. During the creation period, as well as at the end of the camp, there were demonstration workshops attended by children from the community or those interested. The works of art were later exhibited in Lupeni, but also in itinerant exhibitions around the country, which are to be scheduled", Lucian Muntean also conveyed.

The project was attended by: Botár László (Miercurea Ciuc), Lucian Muntean (Bucharest), Justinian Scarlătescu (Bucharest), Marius Stanciu (Bucharest), Radu Șerban (Cluj-Napoca), Aurel Tar (Bucharest). Guest artist Florin Gherasim (Cluj-Napoca)

Organizers of the exhibition: Harghita County Council, Harghita County Cultural Center, Harghita County Council Gallery and Cultura Nostra Association.