Screening
The Fantastic Belt
With Anca Bârjovanu, Raymonde Beraud, Iulia Bucureșteanu, Liu Chuan, Matei Dragomir, Wassim El Hodayebi, Tijn Gerards, Teodor Georgescu & Clara Caradimu, Kexin Hao, Maria Carmen Sofronie, Claudia Moraru, Tudor Necula, Andrei Nițu, Daniela Pălimariu, Erika Peucelle, Sohyun Park, Menno Pasveer, Feng Shan, Christian Thomsen, Andrei Tudoran, Daniel Van Straalen, Yunfeng, Zhang Zhou
Curated by Christian Roncea & Zhou Yi
The Fantastic Belt presents a constellation of works across painting, realism, abstraction, conceptual practices, and digital media, exploring what we might call the Vampire Renaissance: a rebirth that feeds on past lives to sustain the present. Where a previous generation’s aesthetic revival thrived on mechanical repetition, the Vampire Renaissance operates through seduction, dependency, and desire—an art that draws vitality from what it consumes.
Here, artists do not simply resurrect gestures or forms; they extract their essence, reanimating symbols and materials with new intention. Across historical and digital registers, craft meets algorithm, intuition meets code. What returns is not drained but charged—imbued with the bittersweet vitality of appropriation and transformation.
The term Renaissance is invoked not as a return to origins but as an eternal afterglow—a cycle of consumption and renewal. Works oscillate between sincerity and artifice, handmade intimacy and algorithmic precision. As Baudrillard might suggest, these images inhabit the afterlife of the real: forms survive by feeding on their own reflections, history continually reinfused with new blood.
The belt functions as a metaphor for this circulation: a connective tension linking what was thought finished, obsolete, or lost. Art no longer seeks beginnings or endings—it endures by feeding, transforming, and adapting.
The Fantastic Belt is an ecosystem of hauntings, where vitality and exhaustion, memory and desire, coexist in nocturnal harmony.
- text by Christian Roncea
