#8 Inner Gardens / Common Worlds

The first thought I want to open this newsletter with is an invitation: I’d love for you to join me at Grădini interioare/ Lumi Comune - Inner Gardens / Common Worlds, my first solo exhibition in the past five years, opening on May 26 at 6:00 PM at Gallery Studio 76, Strada Băiculești 29, at Combinatul Fondului Plastic in Bucharest.

I’ll be showing original works created over the last two years that haven’t been exhibited anywhere before, alongside the augmented reality installation Weather Forecast: Dystopia.

If it feels like nature keeps returning as a recurring theme in my work, it is not by chance. For the past few years, I’ve been observing regeneration and our connection with nature not only in a spiritual sense, but also in a very practical one. Subsistence agriculture is still practiced by many people around me, and I believe it is more than a hobby — it remains a form of economic survival. At the same time, spending time in nature clears your mind and strengthens your body.

Alongside the exhibition, I felt the need to look back at my own path.

At 22, I started working in post-production, moving between digital compositing, stop-motion, 2D and 3D animation, film, production, and writing. I became the kind of person obsessed with pixels and milliseconds — adding explosions to films, filling city squares with balloons, and creating visual illusions long before today’s conversations around AI and deepfakes. Only it was work for films and commercials.

I worked on some of Romania’s most ambitious independent animated films, drawing thousands of frames and helping build worlds that took years to make.

Later, when I could no longer continue making films in the same way, I learned to write cultural projects and helped develop some of Romania’s early augmented reality experiences for the public. At the same time, in evenings and weekends, I kept working in my studio — reading, writing, thinking, painting, and slowly shaping my own artistic practice.

Over time, my understanding of art expanded through communities, collaborations, and projects developed beyond Bucharest. I’ve also written a longer Romanian reflection about this journey, which you can read in my Facebook post.

At the beginning of May, I had the joy of creating the diplomas for the Radio România Cultural Awards Gala. It was a project made with a lot of playfulness and joy, and the evening itself felt special — a room full of people contributing to and shaping a cultural landscape that continues to move forward despite its fragility.

A big thank you to the Radio România Cultural team for their trust and for giving me the freedom to follow my initial idea exactly as I imagined it. Sometimes it happens very rarely: to see a project clearly from the very beginning and then simply make it, without questioning it too much. It made me incredibly happy to see the diplomas finding their way to the people who received them.

One of the works included in the exhibition is part of The Garden Is Not Empty series, and I painted it while listening to There Are Rivers in the Sky, Elif Shafak’s novel. I wrote about this recently:

A few years ago, I spent an entire day in the Ancient Mesopotamia section of the Louvre Museum, completely absorbed by the art of a part of the world I had never truly encountered before. The monumental Lamassu sculptures left a deep impression on me and have stayed vividly in my memory ever since. I remember spending an extraordinary amount of time studying small carved cylinder seals through a magnifying glass, made from different materials — from fired clay to bone. Rolled over wet earth, they would reveal entire narratives. It was there that I first read about the trade routes that connected cultures and worlds across history.

In recent weeks, I found myself painting while listening to There Are Rivers in the Sky by Elif Shafak. I was deeply absorbed by the interwoven stories unfolding along the Tigris and Thames rivers, and especially struck by the account of the 2014 ISIS massacre against the Yazidi people in Iraq, and by the violence that continues to affect Yazidi women today.

If you find yourself near Câmpulung, I’d also recommend Tipărituri, a group exhibition bringing together local artists around traces, imprints, and the marks left by nature, people, and time. I’m happy to also be part of it alongside many artists and friends from the area.

To listen:
Bogdan Ghiu — “Art was political even when it didn’t want to be”