MARIAN PĂLIE (b. 1978) lives and works in Bucharest, Romania. From his early years, he developed an interest in contemplative aesthetics, an inclination further supported by his studies: philosophy, theology and cultural anthropology. He holds a degree in philosophy and theology with a thesis on “Post-anticipations of Modernity,” a master’s degree in Fashion and Costume Strategies (2013) and a PhD in Visual Arts (2025).

Active in the interdisciplinary field, Marian Pălie connects several areas of interest such as photography, non-figurative collage, applied and theorized meta-styling, video installations, curatorship and bibliophile design.

Themes such as reform, the exploration of the body, the contrast and coexistence between the visible and the invisible, the analysis of the suprematism of emotions, and the decomposition of the body into a post-human philosophy through photography are often found in his works and writings.

His PhD essay satellites around the skin’s surface — a perfect alibi to curate and propose artistic metaphors for the subtle architectures of intimacy and exposure within Skin Territories.

CURATION:

“ICONIA”, Palace of Culture, Iași (2025) • Romanian Design Week – Fashion Design Section, Bucharest (2024) • “EGOLOGIA”, Baia Turcească, Iași (2024) • “Lost Touch”, 15 Design Gallery, Bucharest (2023) • “DIACRONIA”, Baia Turcească, Iași (2023) • “SINCRONIA”, Baia Turcească, Iași (2022) • “One Single Shoot”, Lăpușneanu Gallery, Iași (2022)

Selected Exhibitions:

“TRANSPORT”, 15 Design Gallery, Bucharest (2023–2024) • “TUSSENTAL”, The Art of Living Gallery, Bucharest (2016) • “Tăietura perfectă”, Posibilă Gallery, Bucharest (2015) • “Beautiful Untrue People”, Lipanjeputin Arte Contemporanea, Rome (2007).

VLAD ALBU lives and works in Bucharest. He completed his bachelor and master studies in the Photography and Dynamic Image Department of the National University of Arts Bucharest. In his practice he often combines photography, found matter and designed structures/objects. The works are usually focused on exploring the intersection between public and private spaces, methods of understanding the future of objects and ways of dwelling through a deliberate blend of speculative elements and imaginative narratives.

His sculptural pieces reflect the artist’s inquiry into the ontology of objects – their existence beyond their function as a tool for us – and the ability of things, together, to generate effects and shift outcomes.

Selected Exhibitions:

Records on Imminent Things – Switch Lab, Bucharest (2024) · Geographies of Departure – ArtEast Gallery, Iași (2024) · Going On – HSBI, Bielefeld (2024) · Egologia – Baia Turcească, Iași (2024) · Garden of Forking Paths – Sector 1 Gallery, Bucharest (2024) · Threshold – 2/3 Gallery, Bucharest (2022) · Encountered Trajectories – Salonul de Proiecte, Bucharest (2020) · Associative Properties – Galeria Posibilă, Bucharest (2019) · I would live in a bird house – Aici Acolo Gallery, Cluj (2018) 

ANDREI ARION works with sculpture, installations, and drawing. His inspirations range from games to daily observations of surroundings. These influences help create a unique atmosphere and shape his work. He started his artistic practice by converting boxes into wall pieces, distorting familiar objects into unusable ones.

Selected Exhibitions:

Stranded Objects – Scanteia Projects (2024) • Trying to move without a push – Kunsthalle Bega (2024) • Back to where it all began – Gaep Gallery (2023) • AWOL (Absent Without Official Leave) – Cazarma U (2023) • At the edge of the world – Fundația Art Encounters (2022) • LIGHT CLARITY AVOCADO SALAD IN THE MORNING – Jecza Gallery (2021).

MATEI BĂCANU is a designer and artist living in Bucharest.

Having begun his career as an architect, his desire to move beyond functional representation and real-world limitations pushed him toward digital media. Here, he pursues a more open exploration of form and space. His work examines relationships between structure and softness, material and void, geometry and flow. Over the years, his shift toward time-based media has allowed him to intimately explore motion, rhythm and narrative structures, opening up new dimensions of expression and enabling multiple collaborations with sound artists and musicians. Ultimately, his artistic practice is a continuous, dynamic negotiation of the evocative work that lies just beyond design.

Selected Exhibitions:

huathún – Transmediale Studio, Berlin, 2025; Diacronia – Baia Turcească, Iași, 2023; De Ce Ne Pasă — Galateca, Bucharest, 2022: Pink Cloud (Kinema Ikon s.4 e.8) – Arad Museum of Art, 2021; Autoportret Digital (Kinema Ikon s.4 e.4) – Arad Museum of Art, 2021; BIOS – Bucharest, 2020/ Brașov, 2020; RADAR – Romanian Artists Developing Alternate Realities – Bucharest, 2019.

DIANA GHEORGHIU reveals how distorted our physical and mental experience of life can become under high capitalism, where our bodies are worn out and pushed to self-care under the same capitalist conditions that cause such disintegration.

Gheorghiu works in various media, from video and spatial installations to social media projects, encompassing the realms in which a capitalo-fascist industry catches up with us to seduce and convert our minds. The uncanny actions of CGI, very human-like but not quite so, confront us with the hypocrisies and consequences of a self-care industry that smartly plays those traumatized by neglect from the regular healthcare system. Gheorghiu represents this systematic abuse through recurrent characters, epitomes of the perfect capitalist body, the good fellows who abide by the rules and successfully operate within ‘the system.’ We follow these characters in their apocalyptic post-human sitcom, where seemingly only white and prosperous bodies escaped the rebel spaces on earth. Gheorghiu tackles the realities of living with the threat of commercialized space travel, symbols of the imminent apocalypse: extreme economic gaps in an unaffordable economy, chronic illness, mental health and the erasure of the poor.

Selected Exhibitions:

Binnenhof Buiten, Trixie The Hague (2025) · Noorderlicht Biënnale, Frederiksoord (2025) · Simultan Festival, Timișoara (2025) · The Rise of the Care Machine III, Herman Maril Gallery, Maryland (2025) · GOGBOT x Rijksmuseum Twenthe, Enschede (2024) · UNFAIR24, Amsterdam (2024) · Das Leben am Haverkamp, The Hague (2024) · The New Current, Rotterdam (2024) · The Wrong Biennale (2023–24) · MAFA – Media Art Festival Arad (2023) · Torch Gallery, Amsterdam (2023) · Art Rotterdam (2023) · PARK, Tilburg (2022) · Tetem, Enschede (2021) · Pulchri Studio, The Hague (2020, solo).

ADELINA IVAN works in a variety of media, from textile installations and painting to video, in search of new forms of more fluid relationship between domestic and public space, urban and natural or social space. Her artistic approach has geometry as a symbolic space of resistance against structures of power and dominant environments in relation to personal history and social abstraction.

She uses geometric motifs, historically employed by women in techniques such as sewing, braiding, and weaving, as well as patterns from the textile industry. Through reduction and layering, Ivan translates these forms into a painterly visual vocabulary.

Ivan’s artistic approach deliberately interrogates and destabilizes the canonical hierarchy between high arts’ and the historically marginalized ‘decorative arts’. In her practice, textiles – ubiquitous objects in intimate proximity to bodies and domestic spaces – function as carriers of both personal and collective narratives.

She studied at the University of Arts in Bucharest and exhibited at Kunsthalle Seinäjoki (2025), Van Abbemuseum Eindhoven (2024), Plastic Contemporary Cluj (2024), EWERK Luckenwalde Berlin (2022), Contextile Biennial, Portugal (2022), /SAC (2022), Cabinet44 Bucharest (2022), MARe Museum of Recent Art Bucharest (2021), Sandwich Bucharest (2021), Cazul101 (2021), Litost Gallery Prague (2020), Musée de la Chasse et de la Nature Paris (2019), Spinnerei Leipzig (2019), Kunsthalle Bega (2019), Tokio Art Screening Festival (2019), MNAR Bucharest (2019), MNAC Bucharest (2018), Media Art Festival Arad (2018), Artissima Torino (2018), Anca Poterașu Gallery Bucharest (2018), tranzit .ro / bucurești (2017), Jean-Claude Mayer Gallery Frankfurt (2017), Black and White Biennial Satu Mare Museum of Art (2017), ODD Bucharest (2016), Design Biennale Istanbul (2016)

ALBERT KAAN is an artist who works across a wide range of forms, from sculpture, installation, drawing to photography, video and performance. His work is both presented locally and internationally in multiple contexts, with a emphasis on working in the public space, the works are often brought into galleries in the form of photographs, videos and objects . His practice relies on the performance of living life and transforming the the artists personal space into a shared playground for the public. Born in Romania a few years after the fall of the Communist Regime, he is currently based in Bucharest and the rural area of Gulia.

Selected Exhibitions:

Polisticks – SAC x Rumänisches Kulturinstitut Berlin (2025) • Horizon Flux: Un nuovo strato – ICR Venice (Solo, 2025) • Binnenhof Buiten – The Hague (2025) • My Rhino Is Not a Myth. Art Encounters Biennial – Timișoara (2023) • Mute Exhibition – Galerie Mansart, Paris (2019) • Dimensions Exhibition – KUNE Crew, Råhuset, Copenhagen (2019) • Goldegg4 Opening Art Space, Vienna (2019) • Supercontemporary Pavilion, Art Safari, Bucharest (2019) • Fill in the Light – NAG, Fabrica de Muniție, Brașov (2018) • Form Vibration / Time Illusion – 418 Contemporary Art Gallery, Cetate (Solo, 2018) • Spurrey Seed, Plant Village – Wave Guide, Bucharest (2018) • AN ABSTRACT FEELING – Young Romanian Artists, 418 Gallery Bucharest (2016) • Metha-Lan III – The irreversible passage of time, AnnArt Gallery Bucharest (2015)

AMI LUNGU is an independent perfumer and olfactory artist based in Bucharest. Her practice centres on creating bespoke perfumes for exhibitions and immersive olfactory installations, treating scent as a medium for cultural, ecological and sensory storytelling. Passionate about niche and experimental perfumery, she develops unconventional scents shaped by research and material exploration. Drawing on her background in art, she builds projects that translate social or environmental narratives into smell-based experiences.

Through these works, she expands how audiences perceive space, personal memory and materiality, proposing new ways of understanding the world through scent.

Selected Exhibitions:

Romanian Creative Week – Iași / ‘Noli Sapere – Towards a New Renaissance’ (2025) · Mostrar, Bucharest – National Museum of the Romanian Peasant / MNȚR Plusc Gallery (2024) · L’Heure Bleue, Sonoro – Bucharest / MINA (Museum of Immersive New Arts) (2024) · Aquarama / Playing with the Invisible – TM, Minitremu Unlearning Space (2024) · EB Lab – TM, Meta Spațiu Gallery / MV Sci-Art Space ; The Water Museum (2023) · Talking to Strangers (International Eavesdropping Outpost) – TM (2022) · The Third Place (Holiday on the Bega) – TM / Sonic Narratives (Simultan) (2021) · Wien Design Week / Stockholm Design Week (2015) · Romanian Design Week – Bucharest

EMILIAN POSPAII was born in Pucioasa, Romania, where he developed an early interest in poetry and nature, closely observing his family’s projects. He was inspired by his grandmother’s Protestant books, his grandfather’s experiments in calligraphy and his mother’s passion for landscaping.

He studied Costume Design and Strategies at the National University of Arts (MA, 2011–2013) and is currently developing a doctoral thesis exploring the reform of austere costume. His practice encompasses poetry, publishing, illustration, drawing, decanted clay ceramics and tapestry, while his installations often combine original works with reevaluated objects.

Selected Publications:

RCW Archive 5 & RCW Archive 4 (Romanian Creative Week catalogues); Für Papier und Orchester (exhibition catalogue, 2025, with Nicoleta Radu); Matumpa – Poeme (2023); Hărți Mentale Iluzorii (2022); Eul Personal (2021); Catacombe (2020); illustration in Stories with Ștefan Câlția (2013).

Selected Exhibitions:

Local Design Awards (Atelier Fabrik / Colofon, Bucharest); Für Papier und Orchester — MNAR- The National Museum of Art of Romania; PAD – Mezanin; Für Papier und Orchester — RCW, Palatul Braunstein, Iași (2025); Doctoral Research Exhibition — UNAgaleria; RAD Art Fair (via G15D); Dehydration Stage — Casa Muzeelor, Iași (2024); Matumpa — Fabrik (solo, 2023); Hărți Mentale Iluzorii — G15D (solo, 2023); Impatiens Tremens – Melancholy and the Landscape — RCW, Iași (2023); Sincronia – Ascensio Iesu — RCW (2022).

SILLYCONDUCTOR is one of the artistic monikers of Catalin Matei, a Romanian sound artist based in Bucharest. He works as a sound designer, composer, performer and educator, with a diverse portfolio that includes music for films, games, animations, fashion shows, theatre and dance performances. His works often feature self-built or modified instruments, interactive or bioart installations, field recordings and improvisational techniques that frequently venture into the absurd.

Using sound and its relationship with science, he has been creating instruments or interfaces that simultaneously explore sound, technology, and the environment. In recent years, his attention has shifted toward biolinguistics and the sonification of inaudible phenomena – from archaeological sites to jars of algae. In addition to his artistic research, Sillyconductor is also active in education through the Sgomot Workshops – a ten-year-old series of sound art sessions for children and young audiences.

His works have been exhibited or performed at the V&A Museum London (2014), the Venice Architecture Biennale (2023), Ars Electronica Linz (2018), Light Art Museum Budapest (2022), Belvedere21 (2018) and MAK Vienna (2011), Konzerthaus Berlin (2013) and Berghain (2016), V2 Rotterdam (2009), as well as at festivals such as Insomnia (Tromso), Transmediale (Berlin), Crack Festival (Rome), Arma17 (Moscow), Eurobeats (Washington), TodaysArt (the Hague), Periferias (Huesca), Simultan (Timișoara), Rokolectiv (București) and Unsound (Warsaw), among others.