Tower of Strength, part of the Compulser Lab program initiated by Asociația 4Culture, is a traveling project bringing together artists from Romania and the Republic of Moldova to explore memory, corporeality, and relationality. After its debut in Iași, at the “Nicolae Gane” Museum – National Museum of Romanian Literature Iași (November 22, 2024 – January 11, 2025), the exhibition opens on November 27 in Bucharest at WASP – Working Art Space and Production, before moving to Brașov, at the Brașov Art Museum, where it will be on view from December 5, 2025, to January 31, 2026.
Each stage of the project fosters a unique dialogue between the works and the local context, while maintaining the exhibition’s core conceptual framework, which is inspired by Donna Haraway’s idea that “all knowledge is situated.” In this perspective, the artists’ subjective positioning becomes a source of power rather than limitation, and vulnerability takes the form of an active, consciously assumed aesthetic.
The works function as “affective archives” (Sara Ahmed), activated through painting, textiles, installation, and video, transforming interiority into a political territory and a space for negotiating female identity. Memory is approached as a synesthetic, fragmented structure, echoing Elizabeth Grosz’s concept of the body as an archive of time. The exhibition examines tensions between visibility and intimacy, past and present, fragility and strength, in line with Judith Butler’s theory of performativity, where identity unfolds as a process, a choreography of everyday gestures.
In Tower of Strength, interdependence is a guiding principle: “nothing exists in itself, only through the relations it maintains,” as Karen Barad emphasizes. From this perspective, fragility becomes a mode of perception, and strength is the capacity to transform that perception into an artistic and political practice.
Curated by Andreea Căpitănescu, the project features artists including Maia Ștefana Oprea, Ilinca Hărnuț, Valeria Barbas (Iași); Ioana Aron, Tatiana Fiodorova, Mălina Ionescu, Marilena Preda Sânc (Bucharest); Valeria Barbas, Tatiana Fiodorova, Mălina Ionescu, Mirela Ivanciu, Ana Petrovici-Popescu, Doina Simionescu (Brașov), forming a constellation of voices amplified through the exhibition’s itinerant journey.
Tower of Strength. Instances of Sensibility had its first iteration in 2023, presented as part of Exploring Pluralities, a project dedicated to transdisciplinary formats in contemporary performative and visual arts, funded by the EEA Grants 2014–2021, RO-CULTURA Program.
Cultural project co-financed by: Administrația Fondului Cultural Național
Producer: Asociația 4Culture
Partners: National Museum of Romanian Literature Iași, Brașov Art Museum
