CURA.

When Herta Müller published The Passport in 1986, Romania was trapped between the oppression of Ceaușescu’s dictatorship and the alluring promises of West Germany. With poetic sharpness, Müller captured the conflicts and aspirations of the rural village of Banat, exposing the socio-political conditions that forced people into constant struggle. The novel’s depiction of bureaucratic control and the suppression of individuality seems to resonate with Ana Lupaș’s self-portraits, developed shortly thereafter in an effort to redefine identity beyond imposed prescriptions.

Born into a family of Transylvanian intellectuals who had endured the political purges of the 1950s, Lupaș’s practice is rooted in the rhythms and social structures of the rural milieu, embracing its ancestral rites and materials. Self-Portrait (2000), one of two bodies of work presented for the first time in the most comprehensive solo exhibition of her oeuvre at Kunstmuseum Liechtenstein, curated by Letizia Ragaglia, explores self-representation through the tension between an imposed gaze and an intimate perspective. The work traces its origins to an exhibition at the Szent István Múzeum in Székesfehérvár, Hungary, in 1998, where promotional posters were displayed throughout the city. The central image, possibly adapted from a passport photograph, is inscribed by the artist with the Hungarian words for sensory organs: szem (eye), orr (nose), száj (mouth). After the exhibition, Lupaș brings the remaining posters back to Cluj, her hometown, modifying one nearly every day throughout the year 2000. These handwritten interventions disrupt the standardized reproduction of the image, asserting individuality against the bureaucratic mechanisms of homogenization addressed by Müller. Using colored ink, acrylic, and encaustic paint, Lupaș alters her facial expressions by adding beards and protruding tongues. Through this poietic process of repetition, distortion, and violent reconfiguration of her own image, the artist summons her ancestors, culminating in the oversized portrait of Clara, her great-great-grandmother.

This interrogation of identity and perception extends beyond Self-Portrait to Eyes (1974–1991), a work that explores the contested nature of sight. While Self-Portrait fragments and manipulates the official image in the age of mechanical reproduction, Eyes positions vision itself as a site of struggle. At its core, twenty-one glazed porcelain eyeballs, some forcibly held shut, stare at paintings selected from the Kunstmuseum Liechtenstein’s collection. Among them is a work by Lupaș’s grandmother, the artist Livia Pop, anchoring the exhibition in a lineage of female artistic production. Here, the open gaze referenced in the exhibition title becomes a lens through which awareness is shaped, challenging ideological constraints on subjectivity while offering a nuanced reflection on individual agency within systems of enforced uniformity.

Lupaș succeeds not only in foregrounding ceramics but also in elevating textiles, a medium long associated with undervalued domestic labor and folk craft. As Mechtild Widrich notes, she reinvests these materials with political, critical, and mnemonic significance.^[1] Far from being merely decorative, her textile works function as acts of defiance. Drawing on Magdalena Buchczyk’s observations about vernacular textiles in Romania,^[2] works such as Identity Shirts (1969–2023) seem to echo the subtle resistance of weavers who challenged the rigid folk-art aesthetic promoted by the state. Under Ceaușescu’s policies, regional or personal variations in textile patterns were often discouraged. Lupaș’s work moves beyond abstract, diagrammatic lines sewn onto fabric by introducing shirt-like forms created through layering fabric and padding, with seams tracing bodily contours like scars. Patches, stains, and traces of wear emphasize the intimate relationship between material, identity, and the passage of time, deepening the inquiry into how personal identity imprints itself onto textiles.

If Identity Shirts inscribed bodily presence onto fabric, Coats to Borrow (1989) transformed clothing into instruments of collective resistance. Created during a period of severe repression and scarcity in Romania, Lupaș repurposed remnants of military uniforms, dyeing and resewing them into wearable coats. Each coat bore marks of her interventions, transforming military garments into symbols of communal defiance.

Her processual textile sculptures even challenge conventional notions of monuments, rejecting permanence in favor of transformation, resistance, and remembrance. Originally staged in Cluj and later in Mărgău, Romania, Humid Installation involved villagers, primarily women, hanging long strips of wet linen to dry on wooden poles, evoking communal labor. Rather than commemorating a singular historical event, the work emphasizes collective participation, highlighting the shifting role of memory through collective labor and living archives.

Through these materially unstable and participatory gestures, Lupaș redefines commemoration, shifting it away from rigid memorials toward dynamic acts of transformation and resistance. Whether working in self-portraiture, ceramics, or textiles, her exhibition foregrounds the politics of representation, individual and collective identities, and cultural memory in the face of oppression. She invites us to reconsider how histories are formed, contested, and ultimately reimagined