On Thursday, June 18, at 7:00 PM, Galateea Contemporary Art Gallery will host the opening of the exhibition “SHE is NOT Just a Number”, by artist Anca Boeriu.
There is a place where pain can no longer be spoken. And there, “physical pain does not only resist language but actively destroys it.”
“When we hear about another person’s physical pain, the events happening inside that person’s body may seem to have the remote character of a deep subterranean fact, belonging to an invisible geography. Vague sources of unease, yet unreal; full of consequences, yet evaporating from the mind because they cannot be confirmed by the senses, such categories of unseen objects—like underground tectonic plates or Seyfert galaxies and the pains occurring in other people’s bodies—flicker for a moment before the mind, then disappear.” (Elaine Scarry, The Body in Pain).
“When language is insufficient, the image, the installation, or the artistic gesture tries to speak. She is not a number, she is not a statistic, and she is not just the sum of the painful things that happened to her. These are experiences that have been silenced—not because they didn’t exist, but because they were not listened to, understood, or fully spoken. Yet even there, where words break, the body remains. Not as evidence, but as a witness.
Anca Boeriu, an artist known for her graphic work centered around the human body, uses this series of ceramic works—a material deeply connected to physical form—to transform testimony into shape, pain into an object, and silence into presence.
Let us not forget. Let us see. Let us change.
These ceramic bodies represent not only the victims, but all of us who have learned to live with fear, to make ourselves small, to protect ourselves, and to avoid being “too visible .” The exhibited works show female bodies in defensive, folded, and hidden positions, protecting themselves in an instinctive gesture of survival. Some bodies are marked by notches—traces of violence, cuts that are either invisible or all too visible, and wounds that do not heal because they are constantly renewed by a culture of control and hatred. Here, ceramics become a keeper of memory. The cracks and cuts in the clay are not accidents, but marks. They speak of crossed boundaries, and of the body as a place of violence, but also of resistance.”
Anca Vintilă Dragu, curator
“In 2025, 59 women were killed by their partners in Romania.
Too often, murder is reduced to a mere number or a news story we quickly forget because it disrupts our daily comfort. We look away instead of thinking deeper, searching, asking questions, or becoming outraged. Femicide does not happen out of nowhere; it comes at the end of a chain of abuses tolerated by us, by them, and by society.
Leave a crack in your perfect life and remember that behind every number, there is a body that once lived in this world, a person who had a voice, a family, a circle of friends, and a future cut short.
This exhibition does not seek sensationalism, but it rejects statistical counting. Through 38 bodies, 25 letters, and 10 digits, it declares: SHE IS NOT just a number.”
Anca Boeriu
The exhibition, curated by Anca Vintilă Dragu, will be open to the public from June 18 through July 16, 2026.
