XYZ. Back to the Future
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CuratorCristiana Ursache
Lorena Marciuc -
DateOct 3–6, 2025
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Artist
Dan Cebotari
Dumitrița Gurău
Cătălin Marinescu
Radu Marțin
Mihai Savin
Radu-Mihai Tănasă -
LocationGaleria „Octav Băncilă” Iași
“XYZ. Back to the Future” takes shape as a coordinate system of our relation to the world, an imaginary grid through which the gaze seeks the present.
The Event
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On the conventional axes of perception, time seems to project itself from a fixed point A toward a future that promises difference. Yet, within the logic of the late-capitalist present, this future turns out to be only a variation of the same forms, a loop of unfulfilled promises. Mark Fisher described this impossibility of imagining anything beyond capitalist continuation as “capitalist realism”: a temporal horizon in which the future appears merely as the return of the past in new forms of consumption.
Artists Dan Cebotari, Dumitrița Gurău, Cătălin Marinescu, Radu Marțin, Mihai Savin, and Radu-Mihai Tănasă explore this fragmented and self-referential temporal condition, inviting us to uncover a palimpsest made up of photographs, objects, and gestures that weave together the memory of the communist era with present-day everyday experiences. Through this juxtaposition, progress betrays its fragility and becomes visible as what it, in fact, is not.
“‘XYZ. Back to the Future’ thus transforms into a laboratory of alternative temporalities: between the accelerated promise of capitalism and the circular resistances of history, between the impossibility of the present and the attempt to rediscover it in small, collective, fragile gestures,” note Lorena Marciuc and Cristiana Ursache, the exhibition’s curators.
Artists Dan Cebotari, Dumitrița Gurău, Cătălin Marinescu, Radu Marțin, Mihai Savin, and Radu-Mihai Tănasă explore this fragmented and self-referential temporal condition, inviting us to uncover a palimpsest made up of photographs, objects, and gestures that weave together the memory of the communist era with present-day everyday experiences. Through this juxtaposition, progress betrays its fragility and becomes visible as what it, in fact, is not.
“‘XYZ. Back to the Future’ thus transforms into a laboratory of alternative temporalities: between the accelerated promise of capitalism and the circular resistances of history, between the impossibility of the present and the attempt to rediscover it in small, collective, fragile gestures,” note Lorena Marciuc and Cristiana Ursache, the exhibition’s curators.
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