At Camera Gallery in Cluj-Napoca, you can visit the exhibition Warped Space: Continuous Cities by artist Vladimir Florentin.
“These cities do not stand still. They overlap — development, abandonment, speculation, memory — all pressing on surfaces that cannot support their weight. Warped Space: Continuous Cities wanders through three charged locations, but they never remain separate: E3 (Hackney Wick, London), F0URCH0N//ARL3S //Périphérie and MFN_SIN_106100 — the creative-industrial ruins of Hackney Wick, the vandalized commercial periphery of Arles and the ghostly post-industrial automated network of Sinaia.
These cities fold into each other, edges merge, texts collapse into images, and materials drag memory into raw matter. At the Camera, the exhibition itself behaves like a fragment of a city left behind—part archive, part ruin, part speculative monument—already falling apart when you step inside.
The photograph here refuses to behave. It curves, stretches, breaks. Warped by heat, folded over demolition debris, sliding across metal and Plexiglas. The images no longer remain flat—they bend into something closer to architecture: skins, debris, scraps of floor.
[…] At the Camera, this pressure is compressed into a single claustrophobic chamber — surfaces too close, histories too noisy. No horizon, just overlapping layers of image, material, and leftover memory, sinking into unstable ground. Warped Space: Continuous Cities does not document urban changes — it hallucinates them, interprets them, overheating within them. Photography melts into sculpture, into ruin, refusing to stay put or make sense.” (Excerpt from the curatorial text)
Vladimir Florentin is a Romanian-born, London-based artist and co-founder of Displaced Materials Lab (DML). His practice spans photography, sculpture, and the reclamation of materials, exploring abandoned places, urban peripheries, and spaces in transition. A 2021 graduate of the University of Westminster, Vladimir’s work reflects his ongoing interest in the gentrification of Hackney Wick and the fragile memory of built environments. He has exhibited internationally at Unseen Photo Fair (Amsterdam), Galeria 2/3 (Bucharest), AMP Gallery (London) and ABBF at Peckham 24, and has had presentations in publications such as Tied to Light, INFLUX and L’Œil de la Photographie. His process begins with a wander through peripheral landscapes, collecting images and materials that are later printed, folded, and assembled into sculptural forms. These hybrid objects compress urban history, personal memory and the instability of materials into works that refuse to stay put.
Camera is a space dedicated to photographic art in Cluj-Napoca, Romania. Founded in 2017 with the aim of promoting and supporting contemporary artists, especially from Romania, who work with the medium of photography. Camera Cluj also places a special emphasis on exploring innovative concepts in art and interacting with the public. The gallery organizes photography exhibitions in collaboration with some of the most interesting and provocative contemporary artists. Camera Cluj aims to create an experimental environment, a meeting place for art professionals, as well as a space accessible to the general public, who can actively participate in cultural dialogue. Camera is also the initiator of the magazine Grupaj.
