UNBOXING BRÂNCUȘI
A multi-year cultural program dedicated to contemporary art, co-funded by AFCN and organized by MARe — Museum of Recent Art.

About the program
Reinterpreting Brâncuși's legacy
Unboxing Brâncuși is a multi-year program inviting contemporary artists to reinterpret the legacy of Constantin Brâncuși through three categories: sculpture and installation, photo-video, and poetry.

Categories
Categories of contemporary creation
The program explores Brâncuși's legacy through three categories.
Dialogue with Brâncuși
Sculpture / Installation
Contemporary reinterpretations of form, volume, and space, inspired by Brâncuși's sculptural work.
- Production budget: 8,000 lei
- Mentor: Dan Vezentan
- Exhibition at MARe
Dialogue with Man Ray
Photo-Video
Visual explorations in the language of contemporary photography and video art.
- Production budget: 4,500 lei
- Mentor: Carmen Lidia Vidu
- Group exhibition at MARe
Dialogue with Mina Loy
Poetry
Literary creations seeking new connections between word and form.
- Production budget: 3,500 lei
- Mentor: Ștefania Mihalache
- Poetry evenings at MARe
Program timeline
18-month program
From mentorship and open calls to conferences and exhibitions — an 18-month creative journey.
2026
Mentorship
The mentoring sessions, designed to guide participants in developing their artistic projects, will take place both in person at the MARe Auditorium (limited to 30 seats) and online, from 12:00 to 17:00. The program features Dan Vezentan on April 27 (sculpture–installation), Carmen Lidia Vidu on April 28 (photo-video), and Ștefania Mihalache on April 29 (poetry-performance).
2026
Open Call #1
April 30 – May 24, 2026 | The first edition of the open call for contemporary artists across all three artistic directions.
2026
September – October 2026 | Conferences
Public conferences and debates about Brâncuși's legacy and its relevance in contemporary art.
2027
Open Call #2
The second edition of the open call, expanding the community of artists involved in the program.
2027
Exhibitions
Group exhibitions showcasing works created within the program, hosted by MARe and partner venues.
Team
Who we are
The team of curators, mentors, and partners behind the Unboxing Brâncuși program.

Ioana Iuna Șerban
Curator
Ioana Iuna Șerban (b. 1990) is a curator at MARe/Muzeul de Artă Recentă (MARe/Museum of Recent Art), a poet, and holds a PhD in Philology with a dissertation investigating the notion of the new in the image–text relationship in contemporary culture. With ten years of experience in curatorship, she has contributed to numerous exhibitions and exhibition catalogues. Her debut poetry volume, Zero-Unu, was published in 2014 by Editura Brumar and received a nomination in 2015 for the Premiul Mihai Eminescu, Opera prima. In 2021, Editura Vellant published her second poetry volume, Un viitor care se potrivește trecutului (A Future That Fits the Past), accompanied by reproductions of works by Anca Mureșan. In 2022, at the Gala Tinerilor Scriitori, the volume received a nomination for Young Poet of the Year, as well as a nomination at the Premiile Ficțiunea. Her volume Fată întâlnește instituție (Girl Meets Institution) (Vellant, 2024) was awarded the Young Poet of the Year Prize in 2024.

Elena Stanciu
Curator
Elena Stanciu (b. 1998) is a curator at MARe – Museum of Recent Art. She studied Philosophy (BA, 2020) and Art History (MA, 2023), focusing in her master’s thesis on Chris Marker’s exploration of time in La Jetée and Sans Soleil. Her work centers on memory, temporality, and the ways images shape how we see the world. She is interested in how the past persists in everyday life and how historical narratives shift over time. She approaches exhibitions as spaces for research and dialogue, and has worked across a range of cultural contexts, from independent initiatives to established institutions.

Dan Vezentan
Mentor
Dan Vezentan’s artistic practice intricately weaves together personal childhood memories with a critical exploration of zootechnics and agriculture, investigating themes of food production, ecological sustainability, circular economy and biological waste. He challenges the boundaries between art, agriculture, and ecology, fostering a profound understanding of the interconnectedness of our environments and inviting audiences to engage with these critical issues in contemporary society. His works were exhibited at MNAC Bucharest, Bozar Brussels, Lentos Museum Linz, Kunsthalle Bega Timișoara, Biennale Jogja in Indonesia, Kaunas Biennale in Lithuania, C5+86 Space Beijing, Ethnographic Museum, Krakow, Cazarma U Timișoara, Galerie Boquet Paris, Romanian Peasant Museum, Antipa Natural History Museum Bucharest, Ivan Patzaikin Memorial in Tulcea and the Mobile Biennale in Romania.

Carmen-Lidia Vidu
Mentor
Carmen Lidia Vidu (born 1980, Arad, Romania) is a Romanian theatre and documentary film director whose work explores the intersection of documentary research, multimedia performance, and civic memory. Based in Bucharest, she develops hybrid artistic formats that combine theatre, film, video installation, and large-scale videomapping. Her projects frequently draw on personal testimonies, archives, and overlooked histories, examining how individual lives intersect with political and social transformations. Vidu is the only Romanian director to have received both the UNITER Award for Best Theatre Direction and the GOPO Award for Best Documentary Film. Since 2017 she has been a multimedia director for the George Enescu International Festival, where she creates video design and multimedia environments for opera and symphonic productions. Her works have been presented and awarded internationally in Germany, Austria, the United States, India, Italy, Australia, and Russia, establishing her as one of the most distinctive documentary voices in contemporary Romanian performing arts.

Ștefania Mihalache
Mentor
Ștefania Mihalache was born on August 15, 1978, in Brașov. She is a graduate of the Faculty of Letters in Brașov, Romanian–English Department. She debuted in fiction with the novel Est-falia, published by Paralela 45 Publishing House in 2004. In 2010, she published the novel Poemele secretarei (The Secretary’s Poems), Cartea Românească Publishing House, Bucharest. In 2012, she obtained a PhD in Philology from the Faculty of Letters, University of Bucharest, with a dissertation on the theme of childhood in Romanian fiction after 1989. In 2016, she made her debut in poetry. Sisteme de fixare și prindere (Fixing and Fastening Systems) was published in the Vorpal collection by Nemira Publishing House and won the “Matei Brâncoveanu” Prize for Literature. In 2019, she won the “Boccace” Prize for Short Fiction, France. In 2019, she published the volume of literary criticism Copilăria. Reconstituiri literare după 1989 (Childhood. Literary Reconstructions after 1989). In 2021, she published the poetry volume Cronica Akasha (The Akasha Chronicle), Nemira Publishing House. In 2022, the short story collection Gene dominante (Dominant Genes) was published by Humanitas Publishing House; it won the “Observator Lyceum” Prize awarded by Observator cultural magazine. The poetry volume Sunt liniștită, mi-e frică (I Am at Peace, I Am Afraid), with illustrations by Laurențiu Midvichi (Paralela 45 Publishing House, 2024), received the Ateneu magazine Poetry Prize in 2024, and in 2025 it was nominated for the Observator cultural magazine Awards and won the Radio România Cultural Poetry Prize.

Doina Lemny
Speaker
Doina Lemny is a PhD art historian and an honorary curator at the Musée National d’Art Moderne, Centre Pompidou. She published Brancusi’s archives in L’Atelier Brancusi, La Collection (Paris 1997), in La Dation Brancusi: dessins et archives (Paris, 2003) and Romanian correspondence and artist’s notes in Brâncusi inedit (Bucharest, Humanitas, 2004). Curator of numerous exhibitions at the Pompidou Center, Paris, particularly thematic exhibitions at the Brancusi Studio, which she contributed to reconstruct in 1997. In 2003, he curated the exhibition "La Dation Brancusi"; in 2019, "Brancusi. La sublimation de la forme" (Bozar, Brussels); in 2023, "Brancusi: Romanian Sources and Universal Perspectives" (Timisoara); in 2025, "Brancusi: Sculpting with Light" (Krakow, International Cultural Center) and coordinated the catalogues that accompanied the exhibitions. She is the author of several books, the latest of which shed new light on the work of Romanian artist Brancusi: Brancusi, au-delà de toutes les frontières, Lyon, Fage, 2012 Lizica Codréano, une danseuse roumaine dans l’avant-garde parisienne, Lyon, Fage, 2011, Brancusi, coll. « Monographies », Paris, éditions du Centre Pompidou, 2012, new issue 2024 ; L-au întâlnit pe Brâncusi/Ils ont rencontré Brancusi, Bucuresti, Vremea, 2020 ; Brancusi : la chose vraie, Paris, Gourcuff-Gradenigo, 2022, Brancusi et ses muses, Paris, Gourcuff-Gradenigo ; Brancusi : l’art c’est la vérité absolue, Strasbourg, Editions de l’atelier contemporain, 2024.

Kim Knowles
Speaker
Kim Knowles is an academic and curator based in West Wales in the UK. Between 2008 and 2022 she was Experimental Film Programmer for the Black Box strand at the Edinburgh International Film Festival, and she has presented screenings and served as jury member at film festivals around the world. Her publications include A Cinematic Artist: The Films of Man Ray (2012), Experimental Film and Photochemical Practices (2020), Cinematic Intermediality: Theory and Practice (2021) and The Palgrave Handbook of Experimental Cinema (2024). She has published widely on historical and contemporary forms of avant-garde cinema, as well as poetry and photography.

Andrei Codrescu
Speaker
Andrei Codrescu is a poet, novelist, essayist, screen writer, editor, and scholar. He has written and published poetry books, novels and essay collections. He is the winner of the prestigious Ovid literature prize (previous winners are Orhan Pamuk, Mario Vargas Llosa, Amos Oz, Milan Kundera). He is also the recipient of the Peabody Award for the film, "Road Scholar," the ACLU Freedom of Speech Award, two National Endowment for the Arts fellowships, and was long listed for the National Book Award. He was a regular commentator on NPR (1983-2016), MacCurdy Distinguished Professor Emeritus (1984- 2010), and editor of Exquisite Corpse: a Journal of Books & Ideas (corpse.org) (1983-2016). He has taught writing and literature at Johns Hopkins University and Louisiana State University (LSU) in Baton Rouge. For a list of publications and other creative work, see his site, .
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