Aurelia Mihai

Aurelia Mihai (b. Bucharest, Romania) is a visual artist and filmmaker who lives and works in Hamburg, Germany. She has developed a research-based artistic practice that reflects on process and explores the potential of the time-based media she uses, whether video installation, film, photography, performance, or interventions in public space. In her work, she combines aspects of documentation and scientific research with fiction in complex ways. Legends and historical events often serve as the occasion or starting point for a socio-critical examination of the present. The power of her artistic and cinematic narratives lies in connecting social and historical events to subjective experiences and memories. In this way, she negotiates narrative, memory, and time in a variety of ways, endowing them with historical and social meaning.

Aurelia Mihai has received numerous awards and has participated in numerous solo and group exhibitions, including at the National Museum of Contemporary Art in Bucharest, Romania; Hamburger Kunsthalle; Martin Gropius Bau in Berlin; K21 in Düsseldorf; the Museum Ludwig in Cologne; "The Worldly House" as part of Documenta 13 in Kassel, Germany; the Salzburg Museum, Austria; Museo Nacional Reina Sofía in Madrid, Spain; the Cobra Museum in Amstelveen, the Netherlands; MOCAK Museum of Contemporary Art in Kraków; Chelsea Art Museum, New York, USA; Cheekwood Museum of Art, Nashville, Tennessee, USA; Cass Gallery – Central House, London, UK; the Contemporary Art and the Natural World Centre, Plymouth, UK; Sheffield Institute of Arts Gallery, Sheffield Hallam University, Sheffield, UK; the Centre Pompidou, Paris; Les Abattoirs – Musée – Frac Occitanie in Toulouse, France; BienalSur, National Museum of Visual Arts in Montevideo, Uruguay; the Palace of Arts in Naples, Italy; and the National Museum of 21st Century Arts (MAXXI) in Rome, Italy.

Starting from the Brâncuși versus United States trial, the project turns a pivotal moment in art history into an investigation of authenticity, authority, and the ways we assign value to images and objects. The historical research and the visual component reinforce each other, building a project with a very clear direction. (Carmen Lidia Vidu, mentor)

"The Process"

The project proposes a museum vitrine-style installation that reconstructs, through object, photograph, and document, the famous Brâncuși v. United States trial (1927–1928) — the legal moment that forced the official recognition of modern art. Its relevance to the "Unboxing Brâncuși" Open Call lies in the way the artist turns the very mechanism of institutional legitimization of Brâncuși's work into working material: an engraved plate reading "Exhibit A," a period magnifying glass, and a glass-plate negative analogically reconstructed from a digital image of uncertain provenance together form an "evidentiary device" in which the public's gaze takes on the role of legal examination. The research follows three layers of "the process" — legal, photographic, and artistic — and, through a deliberate uncertainty around the authenticity of the source image, opens a critical reflection on verification and authority in the age of AI-generated images, with the possibility that the installation may later be expanded with material from customs and institutional archives (including MoMA).