Ioana Stanca ½ Midnight, 2024

Ioana Stanca (b. 1987) lives and works in Bucharest, Romania. She studied at Accademia di Belle Arti di Roma, Italy and the National University of Arts Bucharest. She works in a variety of media with a particular focus on performance, installation and textiles. Her imagery follows a particular, intimate way of relating to the space of the studio with its variety of associations, textures and situations. Images of anthropomorphic scissors, female bodies or spools are recurrent in her work, questioning sexuality and oneness.

Ioana was an artist in residence at the Cité internationale des arts in Paris, through the Brancusi Scholarship, offered by the Romanian Cultural Institute (2023) and was awarded the Bratianu Grant offered by the Romanian Ministry of Culture (2020). She is guest artist in residence at AIR Futura, Karlin Studios in Prague (2018) and at the Staycation Symposium Bucharest organized by Catinca Tăbăcaru Gallery, Sandwich Gallery and CTG Collective (2020).

Selected shows: PULS21, National Museum of Contemporary Art of Romania, Bucharest; Gardening Lessons, Art Encounters, Timisoara; It will not be simple, it will not be long, Catinca Tăbăcaru Gallery, Bucharest; 10 years, Nicodim Gallery, Bucharest; I suddenly unfurled many eyes, Romanian Cultural Institute, New York; Soft as water, PINCE, Budapest; Electric Crossroads, Nosco Gallery, Bruxelles; Horror Vacui, RCW, Braunstein Palace, Iasi; Stasi Frenetica, Galleria D’Arte Moderna, Torino.

Stanca’s work is featured in A PROFECÍA. Curated by Filipka Rutkowska as a continuation of Casa Filipka – an ongoing project organized together with Her Clique – A PROFECÍA is centered on an envisioned future through the female gaze; one that enables a more empowered, speculative relation to both time and space, plant, landscape, and animal; one that breaks the brutality of dualistic thinking and binary structures and replaces them with a spectrum, acknowledging and honoring the and rather than the or. Following principles of transfuturism, and emerging from histories like that of Casa Susanna, this exhibition is a frame for repositioning one's own body as the intermediary for a more intuitive knowledge; a knowledge that doesn’t make assumptions but rather listens, looks, smells, tastes, hears, feels, orients, and balances. A knowledge that doesn’t require eyes for seeing but presupposes sentience, non-human intelligence, time, cycles, and the fluidity of being (in its broadest possible definition), and exists within a continuum of experiences and knowledge, through-out (non-linear) time. And as this knowledge becomes accumulated and disseminated, and as personal mythologies merge with predominant norms, feminist histories, ecologies and states of being, through rose-tinged utopian lenses we divine a centered space that is Other – healing, forgiving, holistic, transparent, and visible – in and of itself.