Nature after Nature

— Group exhibition
1-12 Oct. – Garrison Command

Curators: Ileana Pintilie, Cristian Nae and Raluca Oancea

The artistic research project “Nature after Nature” explores the territory between art and ecology, approaching the latter not as a technocratic system or an extractive resource, but as a network of practices of care and coexistence between human and non-human agents. Plants, animals, clouds, and soil are therefore not regarded as mere decorative backdrops, but as ontological and political subjects—co-agents capable of relation, affect, and engagement in both artistic and philosophical processes. Space is fractured into “places of dwelling,” time becomes slow, repetitive, rhizomatic. The perspective is one of continuity and entanglement, which captures, in the spirit of Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenology, both moments of hybridization—when human “flesh” flows into the “flesh” of the world—and moments of “reversibility,” when the landscape represented by the artist seems to gaze back.

Post-anthropocentric ethics intersects with an aesthetics that transcends mere representation, a perspective that may be read through the lens of “remediation” as defined by Bolter & Grusin: a remediation aimed not only at reinterpreting previous artistic forms, but at re-discovering nature itself, filtered through centuries of images, layers of scientific knowledge, and technological mediation. The traditional landscape, as the “old medium” of nature offered to vision, is thus deconstructed through “new media” that sustain contemporary artistic strategies and multisensory, participatory experiences.

“Nature after Nature” opens, in this context, a space of reciprocal listening, inviting us to rethink our relationship with the living world not as an inert backdrop, but as a partner in dialogue. From an object of contemplation or an exploitable resource, nature becomes an active agent in the co-production of meaning: bio-art, immersive installations, and eco-activist interventions that integrate living matter and place it in relation to technological instruments and interfaces such as virtual reality. At the same time, the exhibition reconstructs ecological genealogies from Romanian art and brings them into contact with contemporary practices, proposing in Timișoara a way of inhabiting the earth grounded in care and coexistence. Conceived as a living organism, “Nature after Nature” thus brings together transgenerational perspectives that intersect, converse, collaborate, and differentiate themselves within constellations that do not aim to impose a single meaning upon nature, but rather to (re)teach us how to listen to it.

An exhibition curated by Ileana Pintilie, Cristian Nae, and Raluca Oancea, bringing together works by 41 artists from Romania, Austria, Germany, Moldova, and Hungary: Dan Acostioaei, Matei Bejenaru, Josépha Blanchet, Ole Blank, Irina Botea Bucan, Geta Brătescu, Floriama Cândea, Zoița Delia Călinescu, Lorena Cocioni, Giulia Crețulescu, Suzana Dan, Andreea David, Dragoș Dogioiu, Tatiana Fiodorova-Lefter, Constantin Flondor, Lavinia German, Cosmin Haiaș, Michael Höpfner, Mălina Ionescu, Iosif Király, Aurora Király, Ana Kun, Kopacz Kund, Andrei Mateescu, Cătălin Marinescu, Radu Martin, Andreea Medar, Liliana Mercioiu-Popa, Mircea Modreanu, Ana Maria Micu, Marina Oprea, Raluca Paraschiv, Tudor Pătrașcu, Dan Perjovschi, Bogdan Rața, Claudia Retegan, Cătălin Rulea, Sergiu Sas, Ovidiu Toader, Miki Velciov, Mihai Zgondoiu.

A project by Slow-Sync PH / ADN - Artă. Dialog. Natură.

Image: OUTLANDS - GLYPHS / Marina Oprea, Andreea Medar, Mălina Ionescu