On Friday, July 3, at 7:00 PM, Borderline Art Space in Iași will open Copycat Species, a solo exhibition by artist Vera Buzdugan. Curated by Lorena Marciuc, the exhibition presents a series of paintings centered on the recurring figure of the cat Adonis, offering a reflection on affection, identification, and the increasingly porous boundaries between humans and animals. Set within a near-future horizon in which the very notion of species loses its stability, the image becomes a site of affective, serial, and interchangeable encounters.
“Which one is Adonis?”—or perhaps yourself?—reframes the classic existential dilemma through the lens of species and, implicitly, personhood, however that may be defined. In the imagined era of the Novacene, set in a not-so-distant future, the distinction between species can no longer be reduced to the Cartesian human–animal binary. Instead, it reveals a structure of interference—an interspecies condition. This perspective resonates with Donna Haraway, who as early as the 1980s argued that technological extensions had already become an integral part of what we call “the human,” and later, in When Species Meet, expanded this notion of porosity to human–animal relationships. It also echoes Jacques Derrida, who emphasized the reciprocity of the gaze between human beings and animals, particularly the cat. Through a distinctly pop visual language, Vera Buzdugan deconstructs the idea of human extensions into an affective zone of interference between the two species.
The idolization of the animal subject—specifically the cat Adonis—is obsessively multiplied, simultaneously creating an excessive familiarity with its image and dissolving the uniqueness of a single figure, following a Warholian logic of seriality. Above all, Adonis is a replaceable outline into which any emotionally resonant figure may be symbolically projected. Works such as In Between, Multiply, and In Between Again suggest emotional “captures”—akin to photographic snapshots—that are interchangeable with human experiences. Consequently, this pop cat is not simply a pop cat; its signifier remains fluid, resisting being pinned down through the visitor’s perspective, where multiple interpretations intersect with the autobiographical dimension of the work.
The supposedly rigid boundaries between species are ultimately destabilized through emotion and attachment. Vera’s (self-)portraits become diffuse because they move away from Jacques Derrida’s concept of l’animot, which challenged the absurdity of reducing the irreducible multiplicity of animal species to the singular term “the Animal.” Vera embraces reduction in symbolic rather than biological terms, as Adonis exists simultaneously as icon and non-icon. Continuing this line of relational thinking, Derrida had already outlined the destabilization of humanity’s sovereign position in relation to animals, arguing that the suffering of the latter implicates the former, exposing both as equally mortal beings. In this shared vulnerability, emotion becomes common ground where the gaze fractures the illusion of mastery. Vera proposes affection, rather than the shame invoked by Derrida, as the primary process of rapprochement—whether through physical resemblance or mutual empathy.
(Curatorial text)
The exhibition will remain on view through July 7, 2026.
Vera Buzdugan (b. 2002, Iași) completed both her Bachelor’s and Master’s degrees in Painting at the George Enescu National University of Arts. She also studied painting during an Erasmus exchange in Verona, Italy. Her artistic practice, focused primarily on painting, explores the relationship between image, identity, and contemporary visual culture through seriality and large-scale canvases. She has participated in numerous national and international group exhibitions, including Around the Square (Duke Hall Gallery of Fine Art, Virginia, USA, 2022), Water & Land (National Geological Museum, Bucharest, 2024), Atelier 35 (Iași, 2023), and Fail Better (Galeria Aparte, Iași, 2026).
The exhibition is organized by Borderline Art Space through the AltIași Cultural Association as part of the project “Flows & Sediments”, co-funded by the Administration of the National Cultural Fund (AFCN).
