How do we act in the midst of multilayered tensions? How do we respond when the very right to live is still contested, day after day? How can we counter the opportunistic maneuvers of the world’s leading powers? And how did we end up here?
Crystallizing into a potent response, a dispersed yet connected art world persists, believing in the power of collective effort to challenge the causality of such actions. From this turbulence rises the exhibition in two parts — Notes from Underground at /SAC Malmaison and Wet Snow at /SAC Berthelot, both in Bucharest — not as an answer, but as an echo of defiance. Conceived as an international conversation, curated by Charles Moore (New York) and Alex Radu (Bucharest), it gathers gestures that insist equally on contemplation and counteraction.
As in Dostoevsky’s novel, which served as Moore’s point of departure, the exhibition does not seek to soothe but to stir, to remind us we can still take action. The two parts, reflecting the structure of the novel, build on tension but also on clarity. They insist on unraveling the hidden, the overlooked, the intentionally left aside. Bringing together works by artists from eighteen countries, the exhibitions unfold through interwoven forms of resistance, spanning from acts of defiance initiated by the contemporary art movement to urgent conflicts played out across daily life. The urgencies gathered here unfold like links in a chain — gestures, omissions, and systems that perpetuate each other, showing how the past’s unresolved tensions resurface in the present.
The first part, Notes from Underground, plunged viewers into a hectic, swirling descent into the energy of protest. The space itself became labyrinthine: draped photographs hung around the visitor, forming soft partitions that disrupted movement and demanded negotiation with the environment. It was as if one were descending — like into Dostoevsky’s underground — into the hectic turbulence of contested democracies, where local and global struggles intertwined. Historical moments, from the 1992 Cross Road documented by Dragoș Lumpan to the highly charged 2024 Romanian election demonstrations captured by Codrin Unici and Marco Verhoogt, were presented together, demonstrating how local interventions resonate globally.
Forms of resistance took multiple expressions. Ana Prvački’s “Greeting Committee” injected a comical note, reflecting on etiquette and the subtle ways individuals assert agency in social interaction. Levan Songulashvili’s abstract paintings vibrated with personal revolt, immersing the viewer in frenzied chaos and the bodily tension of constant adaptation. In “Seer Bonnets”, Angela Ellsworth crafted bonnets from hundreds of pearl-tipped pins. By recalling the overlooked wives of Joseph Smith, she transformed absence into agency and silence into vision, showing how imagination itself can defy history. Jonas Staal’s “Propaganda Theater” approached the manipulation of perception analytically, linking historical and contemporary methods of control. In this space, local and global, personal, systemic, and historical issues, monumental and minute, converged; all contributed to a continuum of defiance, making the exhibition a site where every act, whether public protest or quiet social critique, resonated with significance.
Wet Snow, now on view at /SAC Berthelot, maintains the polyphonic approach of the first part, but the chaotic immersion gave way to reflective structure. The exhibition space guides visitors through numbered artworks, revealing connections between diverse forms of resistance. Bosco Sodi’s tactile works embody labor, endurance, and timeless resistance, where ancient pigments and gestures resurface as contemporary defiance, while Philip Topolovac’s sculptures draw attention to historical conflicts, linking past ruptures to present realities. Gisela Colón’s “Estructura Totémica” merges the personal, the terrestrial, and the cosmic, tracing intersections between landscape, materiality, and identity. The series incorporates pigments and matter harvested from the geographical and liminal sites of the artist’s life — aurora particles, stardust, cosmic radiation, organic carbon, earth, matter, energy, gravity, and time — situating the personal within the universal and the historical within the immediate. Rusudan Khizanishvili’s works invoke a surrealist impulse of searching and interaction, complementing Colón’s cosmic and autobiographical concerns. Ayoung Kim’s “Delivery Dancer’s Sphere“ traces rhythms of labor and urban space, emphasizing endurance, repetition, and collective energy.
Urgently, Yael Bartana’s “Homesick” trembles with longing and impossibility, confronting contemporary Israeli conflict and the fragility of home itself. The letters are broken and separated into lines, as in a poem, transforming the traditional notion of “homesick” into the sense that home itself is ill. Bartana, observing Israel from afar after decades living in Europe, reflects on her homeland’s condition: longing is inseparable from critique, nostalgia intertwined with urgent ethical engagement.
Across the two parts, the exhibitions articulate resistance as a continuum: from chaotic immersion to reflective structure, from immediate civic action to long-term systemic critique, from personal gestures to global resonance. Both historical memory and imaginative foresight coalesce, showing that acts of defiance — whether chaotic or contemplative, intimate or monumental — persist as necessary responses to the chain of consequences shaping our world.
Like Dostoevsky’s underground, Wet Snow leaves visitors suspended between immersion and reflection, caught in a space where the weight of ongoing tensions is palpable. The exhibitions leave no tidy resolution, no definitive answer. The viewer is invited to inhabit the ethical, emotional, and political complexity of the world. They are called to search, to think, and to feel. In the end, Notes from Underground and Wet Snow leave us suspended between despair and possibility, where personal and collective stakes are inseparable. As Charmaine Poh reminds us in “Young Body”: “I’m pixel-flesh, code-bone, twelve, and immortal. If I lose, we all lose.”
Article by Teodora Rosu