E T A J artist-run space hosts the immersive installation „Glow in the Dark”, created by Laura Partin, through which the artist illustrates, using various artistic mediums, from drawing and light art to sound, performance-poem, a series of stories about remarkable women from the history of art, who managed to build an artistic career despite the obstacles encountered.
The artistic installation has an educational dimension, aiming to reveal a different narrative, a different facet of art history, in which women artists from Antiquity, the Middle Ages, the Renaissance, the Baroque or the modern period gain a voice of their own, beyond invisibility or exoticization.
The installation, which includes an audio poem and an immersive space composed of drawings made with neon markers on plexiglass plates, will recall the achievements and courage of artists such as Lavinia Fontana, the first Renaissance artist to paint female nudes after model, Artemisia Gentileschi, who refused to let her career be defined by sexual abuse, public opprobrium and defamation and painted dynamic scenes in which the female figure is always the protagonist and not the victim, Elisabetta Sirani, who, before she died at the age of 27, founded the first painting school for women outside the convents, or Augusta Savage, an African-American sculptor who fought for equal rights for black artists after being rejected at the Fontainebleau summer school, Lili Elbe, Danish painter, trans woman and one of the first people to benefit from a so-called medical transition (which at the time was completely experimental and therefore fatal to her), Hilma af Klint, who created the first abstract work or Janet Sobel, the immigrant from Ukraine who invented dripping in her small apartment in Brooklyn with a pipette and a vacuum cleaner.
Laura Partin was born in Iasi in 1986 and studied fine arts (graphics) and art theory at George Enescu National University of Arts. Between 2012 and 2014, she benefited from a research and creation scholarship in Venice at the Romanian Cultural Institute. In 2021, she obtained a doctorate in fine arts at the University of Paris 8 and currently lives and works in Bucharest.
In her works, she explores contemporary drawing techniques, but sometimes also performance, poetic text, installation, or video. Over time, she has addressed topics such as gender stereotypes, alienation, uprooting, or marginalization, as well as concepts from social psychology such as cognitive dissonance or terror management theory. In the context of the pandemic, she became interested in the multimedia/performative potential of contemporary feminist poetry and time spent in nature as a form of introspective relief from anticipated mourning.
The exhibition can be visited between January 19 and February 15, 2025, with prior reservation.
The project was realized with the support of Aripa Arte.
E T A J artist-run space is an experimental exhibition space in Bucharest dedicated to holding events, foreshadowing, and forming initiatives subsumed in the local artistic sphere and supporting the multidisciplinary practices of young creators.
