Engaging with diverse renditions of transformative processes, “Your Germs Get Jet Lagged, Too” unfolds through the unique practices of four artists: Alex Bodea, Ana Botezatu, Codruța Cernea, and Mihaela Vasiliu. Weaving scientific and historical threads, utilising organic pigments, soft putridity, fermented nourishments and delicate ceramics, our exhibition cracks and challenges boundaries of disciplines. We invite you to contemplate and observe a unique collection of works that traverse the artificial equilibrium between nature and culture, employing the mediums of paint, pigments, germs, fungi, and ceramics.
Artists
Alex Bodea was born in Romania; she lives and works in Berlin moving among visual arts, journalism, and storytelling. She is fostered by the desire to testify and record, and she uses a drawing and text-based language, which elements are reduced to the essential. She is mainly interested in documenting the aspects of street life, daily life in big cities, the kinds of passers-by, social dynamics, and interactions. In her fact-finding missions she collaborated with and created visual narrations on institutions such as Serralves Foundation (Porto), Institute for Cultural Inquiry, Martin-Gropius-Bau, HAU, Berliner Festspiele, Deutsche Oper, Deutsches Theater, International Literatur Festival (Berlin), Art Encounters Foundation (Timișoara) and several artists, writers, and actors. Alex Bodea founded The Fact Finder, a space she manages in Berlin, devoted to artists working through field research, filing, investigation, and storytelling.
Ana Botezatu was born in 1982; she lives and works in Berlin. By working with different means, from ceramic to embroidery, from toys to collage, from food to found objects, her artworks follow a complete process of naturalization until they completely blend with her world. With a special care for every symbol, model, plant, and creature, deeply and highly marked by the environment she works in, her objects reveal the impressions of the internal child who travels with curiosity and apprehension across a fantastic world. She exhibited at Lateral Art Space, Cluj, Romania, 2018, Quadro Gallery, Cluj, Romania, 2018, Romanian Pavilion, Venice Architecture Biennale, animations, illustrations 2016, Deltakraft, ICR, Vienna design week, 2016, Amprenta, Madalina Dan, Soda/Berlin, Vienna Art Fair “Dear Money” 2013, Illustratie Biënnale, Haarlem, Olanda 2012, “Rand Figuren” Kunstverein Bamberg, Germany, 2012, Contemporary Drawing, Kunstverein Bamberg 2012, Itabashi Art Museum, Japan 2012.
Codruța Cernea (b. 1979, Târgu-Mureș) is an artist who graduated from the National University of Arts in Bucharest. She uses painting as the ideal medium to exercise possibilities and to discover hidden aspects of her own existence. Her works have a profound meditative atmosphere, often capturing private moments that reflect the growing sense of solitude in contemporary human experience. Nostalgic scenarios of the future, individual experiences as subtle mirrors of collective transformations, landscapes and human nature with its contradictory emotional needs are some of the themes explored by the artist in her distinct and ever-changing pictorial universe. There is a fluid continuity in each of her series motivated by personal narratives and exploration of the extraordinary-normal world that is always surrounding us, both inside and outside. She builds strange and mysterious realms, with symbolically charged elements and views from timeless spaces, where humans live symbiotically with their natural environment or in a constant longing for it.
Mihaela Vasiliu (Chlorys) is a musical & visual entity based in Bucharest. She is part of the Queer Night family, was Shape Platform artist in 2017, and in 2016 became a founding member of the Corp. platform, which focuses on representing and promoting queer identities and sensibilities on the local electronic music stage. She has stretched her tentacles locally, being a regular in the local clubs and playing at local and international festivals. She has been a Noods Radio resident for three years in charge of Alien Flora and a host on the local radio Black Rhino together with Corp, hosting a monthly show called Corpcast. Since 2022, she has been a resident of LYL Radio from France, with the show Primordial Soup. Aside from being active on the local clubbing scene, she also tinkers with the visual and sound arts.