The National Museum of the Romanian Peasant presents the exhibition “From the night of the earth” by the artist Alexandra Vassilikian.
“The exhibition, symbolically and without detours, is a cry-hymn in which the artist tells about the power of violence, wars and (sur)living and includes a series of large-scale works. The artist’s creations are made on paper, in mixed media, with natural pigments, ash, animal blood and hunting bullets. It is a form of scenography of trauma and memory, where the drawn bodies, torn, skinned or suspended between worlds, become presences, spirits, echoes of a pain that no longer has words. One can circulate between the large-scale drawings; the gaze is both inside and outside. It will be a visual confrontation: the works are exhibited at the level of the gaze. It will be an encounter, and the exhibition not only exhibits, but also involves.
The viewer is invited to circulate among the drawings, to encounter them at the height of their own body, to feel the matter kneaded, shot, pigmented to saturation. This assaulted corporality becomes an archive, a palimpsest of the pain transmitted, not through history or story, but through fibres, cells, intuitions. Alexandra Vassilikian constructs a cruel but lucid meditation on the wars that never end, neither in the earth, layer upon geological layer, nor in man, endless chronological stages: experiences, soul, images and again experiences, images, soul. Her works do not illustrate trauma, but (re)live it endlessly, like Sisyphus’s torture. The installation is acutely topical. We continue to fight, to kill each other. The topicality is here in the presence of post-truths, but the discourse is universal, beyond what is happening now: Ukraine, Gaza, Sudan, Congo, Syria. And art does not offer answers, but imposes a look.
An artist of Armenian and Romanian origin, a child of the planet, Alexandra Vassilikian builds her artistic path at the intersection of the culture of violence, resilience and contemplation, at the limit between territories, geological layers and personal histories. With a biography marked by mobility, between Bucharest of her childhood and studies, Brașov of her early youth, Portugal, France and Germany of her maturity, the latter two becoming stable landmarks of her recent activity, in the summer of 2025, she returns to Bucharest with a personal exhibition at the National Museum of the Romanian Peasant. Starting in 2000, she establishes a second living and working space in Germany, concurrently with the one in Paris since 1997. First in a small village, then in an isolated castle, in the middle of the Bavarian forests. Her works also have the charge of solitary performance, because in the silence of her studio in a haunted castle, Alexandra Vassilikian shoots the material from which she composes her art with hunting bullets.”
Raluca Ilaria Demetrescu – curator
The exhibition will close on Saturday, September 13, 2025, at 6:00 PM and will include the launch of the exhibition catalog, a reading, a musical recital and a conversation with the author over a glass of wine.
The exhibition can be visited atIrina Nicolau Hall, from August 21 to September 14, 2025, from Wednesday to Sunday, between 10:00 AM and 6:00 PM.
The exhibition is supported by the Union of Armenians in Romania.
