CAV

The exhibition brings together projects by emerging artists and students alongside the practices of established artists and activists, engaged in community-based work, the protection of plants, unregulated spaces and natural areas, as well as in shaping eco art in Romania. The proposed perspective is one of care, coupled with a deliberate distancing from the romantic illusions of a “virgin” nature, reduced to the role of a harmonious backdrop. Here, the integrity and autonomy of the human are suspended in favor of continuity and entanglement, allowing plants and animals to appear as what they are, while enabling objects to shine in their dark splendor. Within this framework, landscape shifts its meaning, becoming sentient and participatory, while technology brings humans closer to the world, initiating new modes of contemplation. Redefined “without nature,” beyond outdated concepts grounded in the dichotomies between humans and the world, ecology detaches itself from the status of environmental science and becomes a state of connected things: an assemblage of relations, perceptions, and cultural practices that situates us within an environment, helping us to understand the meaning of places and things. The aesthetic categories of this dark ecology, which embrace ambivalences, impurities, and interdependencies between the human and the non-human, while refusing “green” or moralizing forms of aestheticization, move away from any notion of cuteness or soothing beauty, instead embracing strangeness, that uncanny defined by Freud as the unsettling intrusion of the unfamiliar at the very heart of the familiar. The works in the exhibition align themselves with this strangeness, the only condition capable of restoring contact with things in themselves, independent of consciousness, taste, or reason, inaccessible and mysterious. Together, we will celebrate not the author, but their disintegration in the face of the magical power of hyperobjects, as well as the uncanny pharmakon hidden in every plant, every animal, and even the smallest everyday things.