The group exhibition “Crises” brings together works by 20 artists 
in a visual dialogue that explores painting, drawing, ceramics, and 
textile objects. The display revolves around the tensions and 
fragilities of the present—wars, forced migrations, economic crises, 
shifting borders, political manipulations—and proposes a visual inquiry 
into how these upheavals shape everyday life.

In a fragile and turbulent time, in a geography dominated by wars, genocide, ethnic cleansing, arms and human trafficking, forced displacement, economic crises, famine, fluid border shifts—how can we still speak about balance? Has there ever truly been balance across the millennia of human history? What does balance mean, when personal and collective insecurity intertwines with anxiety, depression, addictions, dictatorships, restrictive laws, protests, strikes, manipulation, and post-truth?

It is a time when the technological aesthetics of the visible records and exposes the planet’s crises, everything multiplying in the global online sphere, on social media, where suffering and spectacle share the same display, becoming “instagrammable.” The question arises: where is there still room for innocence, for play? A gaze, a tear, a reckoning… the scroll goes on, swipe left/right…

Life experiences, tragedies and their exposure, the world’s misery in micro and macro, sadness but also beauty, glamour, luxury vacations, well-dressed influencers, commerce—all morph into content consumed within the screen’s flow. Even “well-being,” seemingly a refuge, becomes charged with ambiguities, a privilege of the Global North, sustained by the invisible and precariously paid labor of other citizens. In this context, what kind of art is still possible? One that declares itself political, social, financially eligible? Or one that escapes such imperatives, preserving its fragility and uncertainty, its human dimension?

Today, art stands between the often personal pressure to respond socially and the need to preserve its freedom. All the “-isms” of the past two modern centuries have failed, and behind the great discourses looms the same question: can art transform the fragility of the human being in the face of history and life into expression, and tension into thought? Can crisis (collective or individual) be not only rupture but also threshold—toward change, for better or worse?

The exhibition Crises starts from this unstable ground, where personal experience intertwines with collective traumas, and the artists’ works—functioning as a litmus test of society, mirroring reality—reflect the anxieties and tensions of the present. They highlight precisely art’s capacity to transform personal experience and global tensions into visual and narrative reflection. In this way, the exhibition, though not aiming to realistically document contemporary crises, invites reflection on how these tensions infiltrate daily life and our perception of the world.

Crises do not occur only on a planetary scale. They seep into our own lives as moments of reckoning, between collapse and healing, between blockage and recovery. Beyond dramatism, what remains are rupture and at the same time passage. For artists, this space becomes working material: the world’s fissures and tensions are contemplated and/or analyzed, transformed into new images and forms. Eclectic in artistic forms and media, the exhibition offers a space for reflection and questioning of the social fabric, the environment, and the world we live in. Rather than providing answers, the artists ask questions: how do social and personal crises intersect and influence one another? In what ways are the world’s anxieties and fragilities reflected in the visual language of the artists, in intimate, perhaps hedonistic, political or subversive ways? And above all, how can these ruptures be seen not only as inevitable collapses but as thresholds—openings toward new perspectives and ways of thinking, seeing, and feeling reality?

The loss of innocence becomes inevitable, and artists respond through their works, speaking of the world and reflecting its tensions. Crisis is a time of turmoil and imbalance, when social, economic, or political bonds waver and community is put to the test. It may also incarnate in each person’s life, as a moment of reckoning between fall and continuation. Beyond everything, crisis is a fissure in time, a tension that opens new paths, and art becomes the place where these fractures are made visible and transformed. For the artists presented in the hanging at Scemtovici & Benowitz Gallery, it becomes a terrain of inquiry, a stage where fragility and tension are transfigured from artistic practice into visual language.

If one follows the themes of successive international art events, one can draw a map that outlines the tendencies of social and political reality, the economic demons, the habits of the times, and the ways in which artists respond to them through their works. For instance, the 2022 Venice Biennale theme, The Milk of Dreams, foregrounded women artists’ voices; in 2024, the stage was occupied by non-Western artists, from the Global South, especially from formerly colonized countries; in 2026, the theme In Minor Key calls for listening to the “frequencies of the soul” in an increasingly fragile and vulnerable world. Is it not significant that art now seeks its tone in a minor register, non-triumphalist, akin to trap music, composed in minor scales, resonating with today’s youth?

In the face of crises, artists do not claim to seek balance, nor do they pretend to bring order. The human spirit expresses itself (in the face of adversity) also through art, with the fragile traces of creation, continuing to create on a ground that is, forever, unsteady.

Curatorial Text: Raluca Ilaria Demetrescu