The Body, Elsewhere

14 - 16 October 2026
Opening 14, October, at 18:00
The National Museum of Art of Romania, Bucharest, Romania

Curated by Charles Moore (IKT Member) & Zenoviu Haiduc
Artists:  Mirela Cerbu, Ingrid Farcaș, Marta Mattioli, and Hortensia Mi Kafchin

With the support of Mercedes Benz Bucharest Fashion Week

What if the body is not contained by the skin? The Body, Elsewhere considers the body as something porous and capable of extending beyond its physical form. Across painting, textile, sculpture, drawing, and hybrid practices, Mirela Cerbu, Ingrid Farcaș, Marta Mattioli, and Hortensia Mi Kafchin imagine bodies that resist fixed definitions.

Here, the body does not necessarily appear as a recognizable figure. Instead, it emerges through mutation and reflection, revealed through materials and environments. Mattioli’s sculptures occupy a space between organic life and technological construction, producing forms that seem to belong simultaneously to the natural world and a speculative future. Cerbu’s works suggest that the body is but one of the ways through which a world is continuously constructed and understood. We enter into the dreamlike paintings of Kafchin only to find speculative realms where desire, nature, identity, and transformation exist in unison. In Farcaș’s textile works, thousands of individual stitches accumulate into intricate worlds, transforming thread into line, image, and an archive of physical gestures.

Placed in conversation, these practices shift the body from subject to condition. Flesh gives way to surface; gesture becomes mark; growth becomes structure; touch becomes image. Materials begin to behave as bodies in their own right, carrying traces of labor and perception.

So where does the body end? Perhaps it does not end at the skin, but continues outward and into the materials we shape, the environments we inhabit, and the imagined worlds through which we understand ourselves. Perhaps it ends elsewhere.