“To Wait Without Hunting,” the solo exhibition by artist Ana Maria Micu, presented as part of the Zilele Nordului 2026 festival, can be visited at Casa Nord, in the former chicken meat factory in Darabani, Botoșani County, until August 15, 2026.

“To Wait Without Hunting” represents for Ana Maria Micu both a summary and an evolution of the visual research she has pursued in recent years, since settling in Botoșani. While in her previous projects the emphasis fell on supporting structures, both physical (arrangements within the apartment-studio) and psychological (the reconstruction of the self through gardening and art), the current assembly of existing videos and paintings alongside new works proposes a paradigm shift: giving up the effort of consolidation in favor of pure presence.

This project is grounded in the philosopher Simone Weil’s concept of “decreation,” distilled in the aspiration: “To see a landscape as it is when I am not there…” This aim of withdrawing the ego from the act of looking, so as to allow the world to manifest itself in its absolute autonomy, becomes an ethical reference point and an extremely difficult position, but precisely for this reason a paradoxically necessary one, when adopted as a working approach by an observational artist.

A method of working and living emerges, based on the silent contemplation of inhabited space, where plants and everyday objects are not captured as subjects of study, but allowed to exist at their own pace. In contemporary art, where the image is often the result of a hunt for visual impact, the artist chooses slowness and organic growth, practicing a non-invasive gaze and a form of attention that tends toward the observer’s invisibility. In contrast, in order to question what it means to kill an image and the emotional response that this gesture implicitly triggers, even when the object in question is incapable of physically feeling pain, the antithesis of this idea is exemplified by an installation incorporating drawings caught in mousetraps.

The exhibition articulates a dialogue between the built environment of the host city and the micro-universe of the artist’s studio, offering the public an immersive experience of resilience, patience, and the fragile beauty of times of suspension. Cultural mediation will take place through guided tours and includes an educational component aimed at students in grades V–VIII, coordinated by Elena Arcire, visual arts teacher at the “Leon Dănăilă” School in Darabani. (curatorial text)

Ana Maria Micu (b. 1979) is a visual artist from Botoșani, represented exclusively internationally since 2018 by Mind Set Art Center, Taipei. Her preferred medium is painting, while her practice also fluidly encompasses drawing, animation, and video. Her sources of inspiration stem from observing the changes undergone by her living space, which also functions as her studio, or from negotiating the resources required for the effort of gardening under unsuitable conditions. She has had more than 10 solo exhibitions, among the most important being “Woman, Scaffolding” (2024) at Mind Set Art Center in Taipei and “Left Hand Toward a Distant View” (2022) at the National Museum of Contemporary Art Bucharest. Significant group exhibitions organized by museums include “The Other Side of the World” (2026), curated by Liviana Dan and Alexandra Runcan at the Brukenthal National Museum; “Touch Nature” (2024), curated by Sabine Fellner at Lentos Kunstmuseum Linz; “The Poetic Realm” (2021) at the Yu-Hsiu Museum of Art in Taiwan; and “After Twelve Years. Artistic Production in Romania in 180 Works” (2020) at the National Museum of Contemporary Art Bucharest. In 2004, Micu graduated from the Master’s program in Visual Arts at the University of Art and Design in Cluj-Napoca.
www.anamariamicu.com

Zilele Nordului 2026
Held from August 6–9, 2026, under the theme “chance – what role does it play in our lives and to what extent can we influence it,” this year’s edition brings together more than 100 cultural, sporting, and community experiences, with access to 90% of them completely free of charge.
www.zilelenordului.ro