Transylvania retouched

The Transylvanian landscape is unanimously depicted as a space synonymous with scenic natural beauty. A glance at any travel brochure confirms this representation as a nearly mythical landscape with beautiful mountains and rivers, punctuated by glimpses of immemorial sheep herding and other pastoral activities. This representation is consistently and endlessly reproduced, preserving 19th century fantasies of picturesque and romantic landscape. The exhibition looks critically at the constructed nature of this representation. It demystifies the landscape as neutral, objective, innocent, and averts the attention to the subjective human eye and mind that creates the landscape. By bringing together artists of Romanian and Hungarian origin, the exhibition also engages with the notion of what it could possibly mean to be a Transylvanian artist and how can cultural heritage and traditions possibly be restaged? How can one restate traditions, so that they do not preserve and promote the idea of nation, but they envision instead a way of healing traumas in a potentially transnational and transcultural future?