When Ami Barak, artistic director of the Art Encounters Foundation, opened the press conference for the 6th Art Encounters Biennial, he emphasised that this was not just a show but a research-driven, reflexive undertaking. Amid discussion of studio visits and the open call via the Collision Platform, Barak concluded with a line often misattributed to Virilio but conceptually closer to Mill: “What matters is not the pleasure or the unpleasure but the excitement.” A philosophical sleight of hand, perhaps—but one that frames the curatorial stance with clarity. Art, in this Biennial, is not comfort. It is friction, urgency, presence.
Curators Ana Janevski and Tevž Logar – both with roots in the former Yugoslavia and experience spanning Western and Eastern European institutions – have constructed a Biennial acutely aware of its geography [Read the interview with the curators here]. This edition does not just anchor itself in Timișoara, Romania; it looks eastward, folding the Republic of Moldova into its curatorial orbit. Their selection of 64 artists includes several from the post-Yugoslav space, bridging fractured territories with an affective and conceptual map of shared struggle, labour, and transformation. In this sense, the Biennial is as much about place as it is about relationality – how memory is held, transmitted, and sometimes lost between states and generations.
The exhibitions are distributed across three historically layered sites: the Garrison Command, a military complex that is in transition to become the National Museum of the 1989 Anti-Communist Revolution, FABER, a former industrial space on the Bega River reimagined as a cultural hub, and the Art Encounters Foundation, located in what was once both a wool factory and a kindergarten – a duality of labour and care embedded into its architecture. Each space plays not just a host, but an agent. They are not neutral containers; they are volumes of time.
“It is a method, a structure, and an effect. Echo is not repetition – it is a folding of time, an interstice where resonance becomes a form of communication.”
Architect Attila Kim’s intervention at the Garrison Command – subtly inserting auxiliary walls to create spatial cavities – produces something akin to a memory chamber. These voids are not theatrical; they resist spectacle. They are modest but powerful disruptions in space, evoking what is no longer visible but still felt. Kim, a consistent presence in major Timișoara exhibitions, delivers an understated gesture, supporting, rather than overwhelming, the curatorial intent.
For Janevski and Logar, the concept of “echo” is more than a metaphor. It is a method, a structure, and an effect. Echo is not repetition – it is a folding of time, an interstice where resonance becomes a form of communication. Their curatorial framework invites viewers to encounter echo as a spatial and emotional interval between past events and their contemporary reverberations. The artworks are not static; they move through these gaps. And so does the viewer.
Embodied histories
Artist Christine Cizmaș, for instance, uses her relationship with her mother as a lens into the intimate history of the city, suggesting that memory is lodged as much in bodies as in architecture. In a durational performance that included letter-writing and Polaroid mementoes, her work struck a chord with audiences – melancholic yet tender, folding love and its loss over five decades into a delicate meditation on time. This was not only a private narrative but a microcosm of broader intergenerational ruptures.
Loredana Ilie’s project, Things That Are No Longer Shared (2025, created specifically for the Biennial), constructs a textile-based tribute to Romania’s former textile workers, particularly women. Drawing from the artist’s grandmother’s experience, Ilie assembles a quiet archive of gestures – hand-stitched banners, personal photos, oral histories – recalling a collective past of resilience and forgotten solidarity. Going beyond nostalgia, it is labour re-embodied. Ana Adam, too often overlooked in the Romanian art scene despite a career spanning decades, engages the Banat region’s historical figures in fictional dialogue. Her work resists institutional erasure, affirming that memory is never neutral – it is constructed, contested, and deeply emotional. This act of reanimation poses the question: who gets to historicize, and who remains peripheral?
Movement and corporeality unfold elsewhere – in Simone Forti’s A Free Consultation (2016), a video work in which Forti, lying by Lake Michigan, crawls slowly toward a patch of snow, radio in hand, as a disembodied voice offers a “free consultation.” The image, part reptilian, part ritual, performs an embodied meditation on displacement, ecology, and the ambient interruptions of late capitalism. Forti’s Animal Studies drawings, developed from time spent observing animals at Rome’s Bioparco Zoo in 1968, complement the video: delicate yet forceful sketches of oxen, turkeys, and ostriches that reveal her deep investment in non-human movement as a form of knowledge and expressive power.
The body – its construction, its dissection, its refusal – is also the central site in Robert Gabris’s Anatomical Folding Book (2023). A queer, Roma artist based in Vienna, Gabris presents intricately rendered anatomical drawings that challenge Eurocentric, heteronormative ideals of bodily perfection. His work disassembles and reassembles the human form, replacing clinical objectivity with affective complexity. These folding books, presented at the Art Encounters Foundation, reject hierarchies of body, race, and gender, asserting fluidity, vulnerability, and multiplicity in their place.
Temporal residues
Silvia Moldovan’s Pigeon Towers (2013-2014) expands the exhibition’s ecological imagination. Her drawings of dovecotes, based on years of rescuing injured birds, propose not only physical shelters but ethical architectures – spaces of quiet coexistence in a cityscape typically designed around exclusion. Rooted in her work with SEPALE Bird Sanctuary near Timișoara, Moldovan’s structures become proposals for mutual care between species. Ecological entanglements also reverberate through Cecilia Vicuña’s Semiya (Seed Song) (2015), a video poem centred on endangered native seeds gathered in the Andes. For Vicuña, seeds are bearers of memory – fragile yet resilient vessels of indigenous knowledge. Her work, rooted in exile and activism, channels the Biennial’s theme of echo across geographies and generations, reminding viewers that preservation is a form of resistance.
Also, in the Garrison Command, Oscar Murillo’s The Institute of Reconciliation (2014–ongoing) speaks to collective mourning and ritual. Layers of stitched, weathered black canvas – burnished, frayed, and weighted – transform the space into a site of lamentation. The work, born from witnessing a corpse in transit, circulates globally, each iteration adapting to local architectures of grief and remembrance. A more theatrical approach to history emerges in Liam Gillick and Anton Vidokle’s Camaradzi (2024), which restages a secret 1989 Communist Party meeting through a script derived from archival transcripts. Starring Jim Fletcher, the performance becomes a dense collage of language, paranoia, and collapse – an echo of past power structures that still ripple uneasily through the present.
That temporal layering continues in Two Times After Mladen Stilinović (Extended), a live performance initiated by Manuel Pelmuș and executed by three performers across the Biennial’s venues. Referencing Stilinović’s Artist at Work (1977), the piece probes slowness, stillness, and refusal. The performers, trained briefly and given only fragments of the work’s history, rotate through quiet gestures and minimal action, asking, through their presence, “Does this have a future?”. The performance draws attention to institutional absences, particularly referencing the 2011 evacuation of Bucharest’s National Dance Centre. In Timișoara, it becomes a meditation on fragility, resistance, and the endurance of care. Elsewhere, Jean Genet’s only film, Un Chant d’Amour (1950), plays like an underground signal. Banned for decades, the silent film stages a tender, erotic bond between prisoners under the gaze of a voyeuristic guard, transforming repression into poetry. Its inclusion here aligns with the Biennial’s interest in art that whispers from the margins, resisting domination through intimacy and opacity.
The politics of listening
The local art scene’s structural inequalities remain, despite the Biennial’s gestures toward inclusion. Many mid-career and emerging artists still go unsupported unless tethered to gallerists or curators via networks of friendship. As curator Liviana Dan recently noted, only two types of artists tend to be favoured: the political and the commercial. All other shades – introspective, regionally grounded – are left in suspension. This remains a recurring tension in Romanian contemporary art, and the Biennial, for all its reach, is not exempt. Despite this, something important has shifted. For perhaps the first time, nearly all major players in the Romanian art field gathered in Timișoara for the Biennial’s opening. The event seems to have finally convinced even the most sceptical of its relevance and potential. But younger artists remain cautious. Their concerns about visibility, support, and access to platforms like this Biennial are legitimate – and still largely unaddressed.
This is not a sound art exhibition, but it is structured sonically. Sound functions here as a material and metaphor. Referencing sound theorists such as Pierre Schaeffer and R. Murray Schafer, the curators build a grammar of listening, where sound is not illustrative but affective, not explanatory but atmospheric. Theorist Jens Maier-Rothe argues that listening, like memory, cannot be fully parsed or systematised. It must be lived. Rather than signifying absence, silence, delay, and resonance function as forms of presence with their own density. Lawrence Abu Hamdan’s Zifzafa performance brings this to the fore: “You are the voices, we are the echo.” It’s a declaration of solidarity based not on visibility, but on acoustic presence. Zeljka Blakšić uses abstract layering to produce a formal echo of geopolitical anxieties—resistance without words. Dana Kavelina’s Taki Pejzaż (Such a Landscape) weaves Yiddish song with fragmented Telegram messages from Kyiv, melding past traumas with present danger. Her filmic space becomes a language of survival, poetic and tactical at once.
The Biennial also gestures toward environmental listening – non-human agents, ecological memory, and landscapes altered by extractive histories. The sonic becomes a mode of attention: auscultation, tuning, tone-testing. To listen is not to consume. It is to attune to what lies beneath. Art here does not claim to save the world. But it reshapes how we hear it. And in doing so, it may change how we act within it. The artworks resist declarations, unfolding instead in tremors—slow, soft, insistent.
Still, the curatorial concept – sound as echo – risks hermeticism. The demand it places on the audience to listen deeply may alienate those less familiar with conceptual or site-responsive practices. The architecture, while integral, occasionally overshadows subtler works. And the promise of regional integration feels uneven: are Moldovan artists included as equals, or emblematic placeholders?
“The Biennial also gestures toward environmental listening – non-human agents, ecological memory, and landscapes altered by extractive histories.”
Outside the three primary venues, the city hosts appendages: outdoor installations like Hassan Khan’s Composition for a Public Park (2013) and Petrit Halilaj’s When the Sun Goes Away, We Paint the Sky (2022) extend the Biennial’s presence into civic space. At Jecza Gallery, The Private Public, curated by Mihnea Mircan, acts as a porous bridge between curatorial inquiry and commercial positioning. Among the emergent collections on view, Alexandru Rus’s stands out for its integrity and curiosity; by contrast, others—such as that of Geanina and Tudor Grecu—struggle with conceptual cohesion.
The 6th Art Encounters Biennial may be smaller in scale than previous editions, but its ambition has matured. With only three main locations, its focus is sharpened. The result is a more resonant experience. Not everything is resolved, and not every promise fulfilled – but perhaps that, too, is the nature of an echo. It does not conclude. It returns. In these chambers of silence, memory, and vibration, Timișoara is not only remembered – it is re-heard. The echo, after all, is not only what remains. It is what insists.
Art Encounters Biennial
May 30 – July 13, 2025
Timișoara, Romania
Featured artists:
Garrison Command: Bora Baboçi, Christine Cizmas, Alicia Mihai Gazcue, Dana Kavelina, Oscar Murillo, Mila Panić, Ghenadie Popescu, Ștefan Sava, Bojan Stojčić, Nora Turato, Anton Vidokle & Liam Gillick, Marina Abramović, Ana Adam, Mona Benyamin, Pavel Brăila, Geta Brătescu, Clément Cogitore, Cian Dayrit, Ladislava Gažiová, Karpo Godina, Petrit Halilaj, Veronika Hapchenko, Belinda Kazeem-Kamiński, Kapwani Kiwanga, Ana Kun, David Malkovic, Teresa Margolles, Silvia Moldovan, Andrei Nacu, Marina Naprushkina, Raluca Popa, Larisa Sitar, Mark Verlan, Rosario Zorraquín
Faber: Lawrence Abu Hamdan, Maja Bajevic, Željka Blakšić, Lorena Cocioni, Alle Dicu, Siniša Ilić, Loredana Ilie, Joan Jonas,Jošt Franko, Selma Selman
Art Encounters Foundation: Marieta Chirulescu, Simone Forti, Robert Gabris, Jean Genet, Maria Guțu, Sky Hopinka, Hassan Khan, Jumana Manna, Silvia Moldovan, Eduardo Navarro, Christian Nyampeta, Gavril Pop, Larissa Sansour, Johanna Unzueta, Cecilia Vicuña
