Stepping into José Franco. Génesis at the National Museum of Fine Arts in Buenos Aires feels less like entering a conventional retrospective and more like traversing a living archive of an artist in continuous metamorphosis. Curated by Mariana Marchesi, the exhibition gathers 25 paintings, drawings, objects, and installations spanning from the 1980s to works produced as recently as 2025, offering an expansive yet cohesive survey of Franco’s practice.

From the outset, the show resists a purely chronological reading. Early canvases reveal Franco’s fascination with pattern and surface, where graphic echoes of animal pelage emerge in a style that oscillates between pop sensibility and organic exuberance. These works, dense with visual rhythms, set the tone for a career attuned to tensions between appearance and essence, camouflage and revelation.

Uj Kriterion Gallery in Miercurea Ciuc (Harghita county, RO) presents the exhibition project Gendered Blood by artist Magdalena Pelmuș, bringing together drawings, video works, and installations made of and with beads.

The exhibition unfolds as a reflection on ambivalence, emerging from the very core of corporeal materiality: “When the line of separation and differentiation collapses, the pleasant fluidity that results from or accompanies the entire process of such a liquid deconstruction is inevitably ambivalent,” curator Adriana Oprea emphasizes. The exhibition foregrounds a consciously assumed state of instability, in which borders no longer function as secure demarcations, but rather as zones of transition.

This logic of fluidity is evident in the series Fragile Anatomy, as the artist calls it, where “frontiers and limits between things and reality give way to something indeterminate, polysemantic, indecisive, and uncertain.” The exhibited objects—weapons, organs, and tissues—are charged with a tension that makes them constantly oscillate between attraction and repulsion.

Within this visual universe, violence is not frontal but masked: “perfectly camouflaged and glossy like luxury embroidery, they are turned against themselves.” Delicacy becomes a filter through which cruelty is softened, and “the implicit force and brutality are mitigated through grace and refinement.”

The body appears as the central space of this symbolic negotiation: “what is cheap— the body, vital tissues, life, blood as common, base realities— becomes associated with an expensive, refined delicacy.” Anatomy is thus transformed into a disturbing jewel, where “strict biology is presented as a troubling piece of jewelry.”

The objects and materials used retain their ambiguous character: “non-uniform and imperfect, restless and confusingly dim-glossy.” They coherently extend the trajectory developed in performances and films, where “subversively stitched” and “sloppy-crafted” function as aesthetic strategies that destabilize expectations.

Attraction and repulsion constantly coexist: “organic membranes can be ‘precious’ and immediately provoke fear and attraction, touch and dissociation.” Thread and beads are not mere ornaments, but “tools and media for the same semantic and affective ambiguity.”

Blood, a recurring element, carries multiple meanings: “blood metaphorizes the body as a wound,” but also as a symbol of life and power. In Fragile Anatomy, “maternal blood flows and envelops paternal weapons,” generating a dynamic of opposition and simultaneous fusion.

Gender differentiation, life and death, vulnerability and strength are compressed into a single reality: “the differentiation between genders and between life and death is not simple (both the female body and the wounded body bleed).” The female body thus becomes a space of tension, but also of power.

In the end, the exhibition reclaims the archaic and symbolic meaning of weapons and blood: “the color of life and power pigments blood as the ancestral vehicle and seat of the soul.” The message is not one of violent confrontation, but of lucidity: “Magdalena Pelmuș’s gilded weapons and anatomies, with bead-blood streaming over them, do not seek to be a violent battle cry, but rather a snapshot of tenderness,” as the curatorial text concludes.

In a season marked by ambitious museum programming in Buenos Aires, Pop Brasil: Avant-garde and New Figuration, 1960s–70s arrives at MALBA as more than a historical survey: it is a potent reframing of Brazilian artistic resistance under the shadow of military rule. 

As we welcome a new year, we take a moment to reflect on the perspectives, and daring forms of expression that have shaped our publication throughout the past twelve months. 

Your engagement — whether through reading, writing, sharing, or challenging ideas — is what allows New Genres to exist as more than a magazine. It allows it to be a platform: a meeting point for new voices and evolving cultural narratives.

In 2026, we remain committed to amplifying experimental thought, publishing work that broadens the contemporary landscape, and fostering an international dialogue around literature, art, and theory. We thank every writer who entrusted us with their work and every reader who found value in our pages.

May the coming year offer space to think deeply, read widely, and imagine differently. We look forward to continuing this journey with you — one issue, one idea, one voice at a time.

With appreciation,
New Genres Editorial Team

 A new contemporary art exhibition invites audiences to reconsider the relationship between humans and the natural environment, placing bodily perception and affective memory at the center of the experience.

Created by Portuguese artist Ânia Pais, Shadows of the Landscape is on view at Contemporar from 9 December 2025 to 31 January 2026. The exhibition, curated by Gabriela Moldovan, is part of the international residency programme Studiotopia, organised by the Cluj Cultural Centre (CCC) within Challenge #3: If We Opened People Up, We’d Find Landscapes.

Developed through a year-long research process, the project emerged from a transdisciplinary collaboration between the artist and Tibor Hartel, a scientist specialising in ecology and conservation. Together, they explored how landscapes function not only as physical settings but as experiences that linger in the body and memory, shaping identity and emotional perception.

Rather than presenting landscape as a visual image or backdrop, Shadows of the Landscape approaches it as a living presence—one that continues to resonate even in absence. The works operate less as representations and more as spaces for sensory inhabitation, inviting viewers into a reflective relationship with matter, time, and place.

The first installation is rooted in an archaic and deeply collective gesture: the ritual of haymaking. Working with straw and clay, primary and ephemeral materials, the artist reactivates a form of embodied knowledge transmitted through labour and community. The straw, gathered together with her father from a field in her hometown, becomes a visual and emotional language—an extension of shared work, time, and intergenerational memory.

Comprising three sculptural elements made of straw and terracotta, the installation appears suspended between sky and earth, evoking the natural cycles of existence and the idea of return: everything that comes from the land ultimately returns to it, in an inevitable yet deeply reconciling process.

The second installation draws inspiration from an island on Lake Chios—visible yet inaccessible. Conceived as a space that can be observed but not touched, the work proposes an alternative mode of relating to landscape. Here, distance does not signal disconnection, but rather respect, contemplation, and humility, acknowledging that certain places and forms of knowledge retain their power precisely through inaccessibility.

Overall, Shadows of the Landscape is a sensitive meditation on belonging, memory, and humanity’s relationship with the land—a dialogue between materiality and absence, proximity and distance, between what can be touched and what can only be contemplated.

Photo credits and info - CCC

In the midst of the winter cultural season, the Ipotești Memorial House within the National Center for Mihai Eminescu Studies in Botoșani opens a distinctive visual dialogue between traditional printmaking and contemporary media arts through the exhibition Points of View 2, signed by Cezarina Florina Caloian, visual artist and university lecturer at the “George Enescu” National University of Arts in Iași. The exhibition opened on December 12, 2025, in the “Horia Bernea” Hall, and remains open to the public until January 10, 2026.

A project mirroring one’s own perception

Points of View 2 presents a series of works that bring printmaking, animation, and artistic installation into direct relation with the visitor’s experience. The exhibition is structured as an affective journey, in which the elementary graphic sign functions as a nucleus for spatial, temporal, and introspective explorations. Visitors are invited to move through a spectrum of states and perceptions that extend beyond the visual surface, becoming tactile and auditory experiences as well.

According to the official press release, the exhibition includes works of printmaking, animation, and installation, bringing together the tradition of graphic techniques with contemporary means of artistic expression.

A visual and bodily ecosystem

The exhibition aims to transcend the optical–spatial boundaries of conventional art. By combining printmaking with elements of animation and installation, the artist constructs a “visual ecosystem” in which the viewer’s gaze is no longer a passive receptor, but an active participant in the interpretative flow. This approach reflects the artist’s interest in the ways image, sign, and movement can generate multiple layers of meaning when placed in dialogue.

Although the emphasis remains primarily on the tradition of graphic art and the reflective dimension of the visual act, the elements of animation and installation introduce a particular dynamism into the exhibition space, mobilizing the viewer’s energy in a direct dialogue with the works.

A continuation

Points of View 2 represents a continuation and expansion of the earlier project Points of View, presented in September 2025 at the International Center for Contemporary Art – Baia Turcească, Octogon Gallery in Iași.

The initial exhibition proposed a visual journal in which the graphic sign became a metaphor for human perception and for the relationship between external reality and inner experience. Art critic Maria Bilașevschi described the project at the time as “a cartography of interior states through visual pulsations and speculative rhythms,” emphasizing the connection between printmaking, animation, and installation as forms of meditation on perception.

The artistic project Points of View foregrounded the role of the sign as non-text—an element that does not merely represent, but evokes mental and affective processes in its interaction with the viewer.

An art of introspection

Points of View 2 aligns with contemporary tendencies toward the exploration of visual hybridity, where the boundaries between tradition and innovation blur, giving rise to a complex aesthetic experience. Through this exhibition, Cezarina Caloian reiterates her commitment to an art practice that does not limit itself to sight alone, but engages the viewer’s full sensibility. The exhibition at the Ipotești Memorial is not merely a presentation of works, but a space for reflection on how we see, feel, and understand the world around us.

Notes on the artist

Cezarina Florina Caloian was born in Iași in 1981 and has developed a solid professional trajectory in the field of visual arts. A graduate of the Faculty of Visual Arts and Design in Iași, specializing in Graphics, and holder of a PhD in Visual Arts (2009), she is currently a habilitated associate professor in Graphics at the “George Enescu” National University of Arts in Iași. The exhibition Points of View 2 marks an important moment in her artistic and professional evolution, consolidating her ongoing exploration of perception within graphic art and media practices.

Photo credits - Ana Maria Micu & Cezarina Caloian 

From the opening moments of the exhibition, “Visión imposible” (Impossible Vision) at Recoleta Cultural Center reveals itself as less a conventional “show” and more a deliberate reimagining of materials and space: a sculptural installation that dissolves the boundary between drawing and three-dimensional form. Ullua uses mild steel — a humble, industrial metal — as if it were pencil or charcoal, lifting lines off a page and suspending them in air. The result is simultaneously minimal and daring: delicate arcs, loops, and tangles that hover, bend and hover again, tracing volatile geometries in the gallery’s volume.

Recoleta Cultural Center

What makes this transformation especially powerful is Ullua’s willingness to embrace color. In “Visión imposible”, the metal is not only shaped; it is painted, coated, gifted with hues that introduce new perceptual tensions. The interplay of line, volume, and color destabilizes the viewer’s assumptions: a “drawing” that occupies space, a “sculpture” that feels graphic. The gallery becomes a field of floating gestures, where shadows and reflections participate, and where negative space becomes as charged as the material itself.

Beneath the formal experimentation lies, however, a quiet wit and a sense of modesty, traits characteristic of Ullua’s broader practice. The exhibition does not seek grandeur, but intimacy. The metal lines do not attempt to dominate; they insinuate, invite, challenge quietly. It is a humble poetry of form, born from discarded or industrial materials repurposed into delicate structures.

Moreover, “Visión imposible” seems to ask something of the viewer: to move, to shift perspective, to reconsider what counts as drawing, what counts as volume, what counts as space. At different vantage points, the work changes, lines that appear connected dissolve, tangles resolve into airy arcs. In this way, the exhibition becomes less a static display than a dynamic experience, a choreography of gaze and spatial relation.

Curated by Carla Barbero, the show feels like a thoughtful continuation and refinement of Ullua’s ongoing investigation into the poetic potential of industrial material, line, humor, and space. It neither flaunts technical virtuosity nor shock value; instead, it invites reflection, subtle disorientation, and a renewed awareness of how a simple “line” can occupy and transform the world around us.

For those accustomed to heavy, monumental contemporary sculpture, “Visión imposible” might feel almost ghostly: thin, airy, fragile. Yet that is precisely its strength. There is an elegance in its restraint, a radicalism in sparseness. It’s an exhibition that doesn’t shout, it whispers. And in its whispers, it manages to rewire the space of the gallery, and briefly, rewire how we see.

Fernando Maza: “La construcción de la pintura” (The Construction of Painting) is a quietly mesmerizing testament to the singular vision of one of Argentina’s most enigmatic painters. At the National Museum of Fine Arts, over fifty oils and watercolors chart a rich trajectory—from Maza’s early informalist experiments in the late 1950s to his most contemplative works produced in his French retirement.

Curated by Pablo De Monte, the exhibition succeeds in presenting Maza not simply as a painter, but as a metaphysical architect of space. Rather than depicting the natural world, his canvases conjure invented landscapes whose structures — staircases that lead to nowhere, arches that open into silence — suggest neither destination nor origin.

Recently, a new experimental curatorial and exhibition project was presented at Galeria Aparte (UNAGE Iași, Romania). The curator noted that this project, titled Outsourced Practices II – Endless Extractions, was never about how it looked. It refused the comfort of the finished object and—deliberately—avoided the seduction of the image altogether.

As curator Cristian Nae explains, it was “about process, the aesthetics of precarity, the production of affects and ideas,” often unfolding in ways that were invisible, understated, or indistinguishable from the mundane gestures of everyday life. What emerged was a curatorial experiment in which artistic labour—its rhythms, frictions, and hesitations—became both medium and message.

Within this experimental framework, each artist contributed a gesture that destabilised the conventions of exhibition-making. Tudor Pătrașcu quite literally “drew in time,” transforming duration itself into artistic material. Dan Acosti extended the narrative of a TikTok character he had previously developed—a persona critiquing influencer cultures that instrumentalise spirituality and religion for symbolic capital. Oana Nae turned domestic labour into performance, repeatedly washing and rewriting the gallery floor in a Sisyphean loop of repetitive effort. Andrei Timofte made his presence audible through the continuous saving of digital files, turning a bureaucratic gesture of the digital workspace into a kind of ambient drone. Meanwhile, Savin Aureliu Mihai, in a vulnerable surrender to process, slept overnight in the gallery as a 3D printer generated the sculptural image of his resting body. “Crazy artist,” Nae remarks with affectionate irony. “And what can I say about that oblique reference to Tracey Emin?”

Beyond these actions, the project is anchored in a broader theoretical landscape informed by recent post-Marxist thought. In an economy shaped by what McKenzie Wark calls the vectoralist class—those who control the infrastructures of data, attention, and cultural mediation—artistic labour no longer produces objects. Instead, it generates affects, visibility, and circulation. The artist becomes simultaneously producer and product, worker and brand, caught in a metabolic cycle in which attention is commodified and creativity becomes a resource to be harvested.

As Nae’s curatorial text argues, “artistic labour, although seemingly immaterial, involves a profound form of alienation,” precisely because its value is detached from its material outcome. Rather, value arises from circulation within symbolic and economic networks. In this context, the precarious artist—freelancer, cultural worker, content generator—embodies a new, refined proletarianization masked by the rhetoric of autonomy and passion. Precarity—underpaid, unpaid, fragmented—reveals the extraction mechanisms of techno-capitalism, in which affect, free time, and performativity all become exploitable resources.

The exhibition functions as a diagram of these invisible forms of work. The 3D-printed sculpture, the installations documenting repetitive or domestic labour, and the performances that mimic the gestures of daily routine or online content production each serve as diagnostic tools. They bring into tension manual and automated labour, domestic and intellectual work, what is materially visible and what is systematically obscured.

The curatorial framework draws on Helen Hester’s critique of how productivity colonises leisure time, Franco “Bifo” Berardi’s analyses of affective exhaustion, and Hito Steyerl’s notion of the “circulating capital of the image.” These references position the exhibition as a critical cartography of labour in its post-industrial expansion.

Here, the artistic gesture becomes an act of temporal and epistemic resistance: an effort to reconceptualise work not as obligation, but as a practice of making visible what contemporary symbolic economies prefer to keep hidden. Ultimately, the exhibition proposes that the unfinished, the fragile, the repetitive, and the invisible are not failures of artistic production, but essential tools for understanding how work—and life—are shaped today.

Photo credits: Galeria Aparte