Last October, we visited Bucharest for the first edition of Romanian Art Week, which celebrates Bucharest’s extraordinary art ecosystem by featuring a breadth of artist-run spaces, galleries, museums, and cultural institutions. The Art Week highlights exhibitions, gallery openings, artist talks, and special events celebrating the city’s unparalleled destination for contemporary art.

We are delighted to present our coverage, featuring documentation from some of the most exciting exhibitions that have taken place in the city in the last few weeks, some of which are still open and others that have already concluded. While this selection obviously does not intend to cover everything that happened during the week, nor does it claim to represent the city’s art scene as a whole, we have tried to offer a diverse selection of shows to encourage readers to take notice of a rapidly growing art scene.

Let’s begin by discussing “The Promise,” a solo exhibition by Christian Jankowski (1968, Göttingen) at SCÂNTEIA+, located in the former press office of the Romanian Communist Party. The exhibition invites us to explore the artist’s work through the lens of Mihaela Mincă, one of the country’s most powerful witches. With no shortage of irony and wit, the exhibition—conceived as both a retrospective and a presentation of new work—brings the artist’s intentions and gestures into dialogue with Mincă’s magical wisdom, entrusting her with the selection and curation of the show. In one of the videos presented in the space, the artist himself admits to the difficulty of being an artist and his need for help from the spells and charms of this powerful witch.

The photographic works hung on the gallery walls are particularly remarkable, surrounding other, more or less monumental pieces situated in the center of the exhibition space. These are staged scenes of various spells in which Mihaela Mincă appears with her coven to influence the artist’s fate. Enhancing relevance, innovation, originality, impact, conceptual depth, reputation, as well as other qualities desired by any artist. The exhibition successfully and ingeniously explores the idea of the artist as a mediator between life and art, society, and popular culture.

“Iconoflux” at the Arsmonitor Gallery and “Bent Crosses” at the MNAC, on the other hand, share a desire to reconnect with sacred and religious themes that are typically absent from contemporary art discourse. The group exhibition at Arsmonitor traces artistic practices from the 1970s to the present, emphasizing the contextualization and the original symbolic void that some of these sacred symbols suffer from today. At the MNAC, we were fortunate to visit the retrospective exhibition of Marian (1956, Balotești) and Victoria Zidaru (1956, Liteni), featuring a diverse array of objects, materials, moving images, and gestural works. Both exhibitions reveal a period of intense material and ideological tension during the final stage of the regime of Nicolae Ceaușescu, the Romanian dictator who was Romania’s second and last communist leader. Beyond the political context that produced and shaped a certain kind of spirituality at the time, both exhibitions perhaps express a testimony to today’s Europe—full of anxieties and fears—rather than that of the final years of communism, the world following the fall of the Wall and the dissolution of the Soviet Union.

A certain sense of optimism was palpable throughout the various exhibitions and events during Romanian Art Week. I’m not sure if it was the experience of the city itself—with its myriad juxtapositions of landscapes that constantly overlap—or the company of a group of guests who were simply having a great time. Our next stop was the “AEROSOLI” exhibition at Vila Catena, where curator Maria Bîrsan (1998, Constanța) gave us a guided tour. The exhibition functions as a sort of observatory of Romania’s Black Sea coast during its high season, exploring its tourists, shipwrecks, with the backdrop of the constant tension caused by Russia’s drones and war of occupation. However, it offers a nuanced perspective that goes beyond the purely descriptive and material, blending humor and melancholy through works such as “Everything More Than That” by Larisa Sitar (1984, Baia Mare), “La rece / The Room I Never Had” by Nadina Stoica (1997, Constanța), and “Sun Shavings” by Daniela Pălimariu (1986, Iași).

After getting off the minibus that had taken us from one side of the city to the other—which added yet another layer of fragmentation to the city—we stopped at an industrial building that housed the Catinca Tabacaru Gallery. We had the opportunity to visit two exhibitions: “In Between” by Youssra Raouchi (1999, Beirut) and “Bucharest is a Crumbly Cookie” by Ioana Mincu (2001, Romania); for the latter, we were joined by the artist and the gallery owner. It was a charming exhibition due to its material quality and artistic personality, especially the work that gives the exhibition its title. Created in ceramic and watercolor on paper, the piece depicts a building that evokes a sense of home with great tenderness and attention to every last detail. Furthermore, the artist’s dog was present in the space during our visit, which also features prominently in one of the pieces in the exhibition. In a certain way, the work and the artist together seem to inhabit a united (and generous) universe of intimacy and introspection, built upon the concrete brick platforms laid out in the gallery.

Aside from discussing some of the exhibitions that are part of Romanian Art Week, this publication aims to highlight the diversity of initiatives taking place in Bucharest. Events such as this allow us to discover different contexts and follow recent developments across the international art scene. We invite readers to browse through the photographic documentation presented here. We hope it will help ensure that the second edition is as well received as the first, which already has its own smartphone app that can be downloaded here. We hope you enjoy this feature.