Curatorial Positions in Central and Eastern Europe III.

Interview with romanian curator Mirela Stoeac-Vlăduți

Mirela Stoeac-Vlăduți is a curator based in Timișoara, Romania. She is the founder and artistic director of META Spațiu, an independent contemporary art organisation established in 2016, and the director of MV sci-art, a transdisciplinary centre dedicated to the dialogue between art and science, developed in partnership with the Politehnica University of Timișoara.

With a background in curating and journalism, with a Master’s in Curatorial and Visual Studies from UNARTE Bucharest, she brings to her practice a persistent interrogation of how power structures shape cultural narratives—and how art can operate critically within and against them. Her curatorial work navigates speculative philosophy, ecological thought, digital culture, and the porous boundaries between the human and the post-human.

META Spațiu operated for several years as a nomadic platform—inhabiting museums, public spaces, and institutional margins—before establishing a permanent home at the Politehnica University campus in 2022. The organisation’s programme has included exhibitions, residencies, interdisciplinary research projects, and educational initiatives, with collaborators and artists drawn from Romania, Central and Eastern Europe, and beyond. Among its recent projects are Eco-cultural Tides (Submerged Narratives of the Danube and Oslo Fjord), a bilateral research-based exhibition co-produced with Norwegian partners and supported by EEA and Norway Grants; we thought we’d last forever, a speculative sci-fi odyssey with Cosmin Haiaș; and New Tab, a critical investigation of art, technology, and the attention economy.

She has lectured at the University of Oslo, the Technical University of Cluj-Napoca, and the Politehnica University of Timișoara, and has contributed to publications including Revista Arta. Her writing and curatorial practice share a common axis: the conviction that the gap between what an image does and what language can say about it is not a limitation but the very space where meaning becomes possible.

Your professional path moves across journalism, cultural management, and curating. Looking back, how did these different roles shape your understanding of what a curator should be today in Romania and in the wider Central and Eastern European context?

Journalism taught me to read power structures—not just cultural ones, but political and social ones. I spent over fifteen years embedded in political reporting, and what I carried out of that into curatorial practice is a certain restlessness about how narratives get constructed and whose interests they serve. I don’t think I’ve ever fully left the journalist behind; she still shows up in the way I research an exhibition, in the questions I ask of an artwork before it enters a space.

What I find genuinely interesting about the CEE condition—and I say this as someone who grew up mentally oriented toward the West, as a kind of projection that is very specific to the Balkans, this desire to emigrate if not physically then at least psychically—is that I only recently began to properly acknowledge that displacement. There is a real disjunction between the mental landscape I inhabited and the actual political and social realities I was reporting on. I was aligned to Western preoccupations without truly internalising them. Curating, strangely, was what brought me back into my own geography.

A curator in this region today cannot afford to be only a tastemaker. You are also, whether you like it or not, an institution-builder, a mediator between artists and the conditions that make or break their practice, and sometimes a quiet advocate in rooms where cultural policy is decided by people who have never set foot in a contemporary art space. The roles bleed into each other constantly.

META Spațiu was founded in 2016 as an independent, hybrid structure, and for several years it operated in a rather fluid, nomadic way before moving into its own space. How did this condition influence your curatorial thinking, your working methods, and your sense of institutional freedom or precarity?

The nomadic phase was formative in ways I couldn’t have designed. When you don’t have a fixed address, you are forced to think about what a space actually does to an artwork and to an audience—what it frames, what it excludes, what assumptions it carries. We were “parasitising” other spaces, as we used to say: museums, galleries, public locations. That verb was accurate and intentional. It implies a relationship of dependency but also of transformation. The host is changed by the parasite, and vice versa.

The name META derives from the Greek prefix meaning “beyond” but for us it has always meant something closer to time. META Spațiu is a space beyond the physical space; it is a space of ideas, of speculative positions, of what we might call alternative unfoldings of the present reality. That philosophy didn’t emerge from having a beautiful white cube. It emerged from not having one.

The precarity was real. It still is. But I’ve come to understand it as structurally inseparable from independence. The moment you become institutionally secure, you begin to make different decisions—not necessarily worse ones, but different. There is a kind of clarity that comes from operating without a safety net. You ask harder questions about why you’re making something, and for whom.

The first text of this interview series stresses that, in Central and Eastern European contexts, curators often have to work far beyond exhibition-making. In your daily practice, where does curating end and where do management, mediation, fundraising, and institution-building begin?

Honestly, I’ve stopped trying to draw that line. I sometimes describe it as driving a Formula 1 car—there are corners where you must brake, accelerations that are non-negotiable, and a constant switching of gears that requires full concentration.

What I’ve come to value is holding all three roles—initiator, manager, curator—as a kind of privilege I built for myself, in deliberate opposition to institutional career paths. In Romania, the public sector model of cultural management tends to work through designations: you are appointed to a role or selected through a competition someone constructed with you in mind. I found that model structurally incompatible with how I think. So I built my own position, in a field that is, at its best, genuinely democratic and meritocratic—especially outside the establishment.

The curatorial role is where I experience the deepest satisfaction. But I could not exercise it with the same freedom if I hadn’t also built the conditions that make it possible. They are not separate practices. They are the same practice operating at different registers.

What have been the main structural challenges of working independently in Timișoara: funding instability, audience development, maintaining continuity, or building long-term trust with artists and partners? Which of these has been the most difficult to negotiate?

The hardest challenge has been not giving up. That sounds like a simple thing to say, but it is in fact the most demanding daily practice. We operate in a climate where public support is almost non-existent, where funding cycles bear no relationship to the actual rhythms of cultural production, and where crisis is not the exception but the structural condition.

What I’ve learned—and it took longer than I’d like to admit—is to find meaning in small victories. Not as a consolation, but as a genuine recalibration of what constitutes success. An artist tells you that an exhibition changed how they think about their own work. A student who was initially intimidated by the gallery space starts spending time there voluntarily. A scientist at the Politehnica who had never engaged with contemporary art begins asking questions about an artwork that a critic might not have thought to ask. These are not minor events. They are the actual substance of what we do.

Trust with artists is built slowly and tested constantly. I think the fact that I have no ambition to be a visual artist myself—no repressed frustration in that direction—gives me a particular kind of equilibrium in those relationships. My only desire is to serve their work, to place it in the best possible light, to help it reach its full meaning in public.

META Spațiu presents Romanian and international artists while also positioning itself within a broader Central and Eastern European framework. How do you understand this regional positioning today? Do you see ‘CEE’ as a productive framework, a strategic label, or something that also needs to be critically questioned?

All three, simultaneously, and I’m increasingly suspicious of anyone who answers that question with only one of the options.

The label is useful when it opens doors—when it places us within conversations that Western institutions are only now beginning to have about the geographies they excluded from their canons for decades. In that sense, CEE is a productive framework. It names a shared structural experience: the negotiation between local histories and globally circulating art world vocabularies, between institutional underfunding and intellectual vitality.

But the label can also flatten. It collapses enormous differences—between Prague and Timișoara, between Warsaw and Bucharest, between national art systems that have undergone very different transformations since 1989. I’m wary of the moment when “CEE” becomes an aesthetic category, a kind of geographic exoticism that simply redistributes the old centre/periphery logic in more polite language.

For us, the regional positioning is first and foremost operational. It enables collaborations, funding structures, mobility. Whether it also constitutes a meaningful artistic identity is a question I’d rather leave open than resolve prematurely.

In 2022, you opened MV sci-art Center together with the Politehnica University of Timișoara, as a space dedicated to transdisciplinary dialogue between art and science. What kinds of negotiations were necessary to make such a collaboration work between an independent art initiative and a technical university?

The key factor was the Rector, Florin Drăgan, who is genuinely, personally engaged with art—someone who visits museums, who thinks about the questions that culture asks. Without that kind of institutional will at the highest level, no amount of shared interest at the working level would have been sufficient.

The university community received us with understandable suspicion at the beginning. An independent contemporary art organisation entering a technical university is not an obvious proposition. But something interesting happened over time, particularly with the students. They went from being intimidated by the gallery—not knowing how to behave in it, uncertain whether it was a space meant for them—to inhabiting it with real ease and curiosity. That transformation is, for me, one of the most significant things we have achieved.

The productive friction between the two institutions runs deeper than protocol. What happens when an artist and a scientist look at the same object? Both operate with the eye as their primary instrument, but they are trained to see entirely different things. That gap—and the willingness to stay in it, rather than resolve it quickly into metaphor—is what MV sci-art tries to hold open.

You have often worked with projects that connect contemporary art to scientific research, ecology, and technology. What does curatorial mediation mean in these contexts, especially when the works involve specialized vocabularies that might initially feel distant to a broader public?

I think about this constantly. My academic background is in philosophy (mainly aesthetics), literature, and journalism—I have spent my entire life working with text, with language as the primary instrument of thought. And yet I’ve chosen a practice in which the visual holds authority that language, at its best, can only approach. That tension is generative for me, and I think it’s also what makes me useful in these contexts.

When an artwork engages with scientific research—with ecology, with data systems, with non-human processes—the curatorial text has to do something more than explain. Explanation can actually close off an experience rather than open it. What I try to do is create conditions: conceptual frameworks loose enough to let the audience find their own way in, but precise enough to prevent the work from collapsing into decoration.

Our public engagement work we do—the talks, the guided visits, the workshops for children and families—operates by the same principle. Children, in particular, have a relationship to art objects that is more direct and less defended than most adult responses. They don’t ask whether they’re “supposed to” understand something. I always say: children could explain contemporary art to adults, not the other way around.

Several of your exhibitions—such as Submerged Narratives of the Danube and Oslo Fjord, and we thought we’d last forever, or New Tab—engage with ecology, science, digital culture, or speculative futures. What attracts you to these thematic intersections, and what do they allow you to articulate that a more conventional exhibition format would not?

At META Spațiu, we navigate between alternative realities—what you might symbolically call metaverses: alternative versions or trajectories of what we currently call the present. That is not a metaphor I’ve arrived at recently; it was embedded in the name from the beginning.

In and we thought we’d last forever, Cosmin Haiaș builds worlds that are simultaneously familiar and alien—ruins of civilisations yet to come, fragments of human memory drifting through cosmic landscapes, technologies that are no longer used and never entirely were. The exhibition is less a static presentation than a narrative space, in which the very idea of “forever” dissolves into speculation. We are invited to think about what remains when the horizon of time collapses.

New Tab approaches the same questions from the digital side: how does art function in an attention economy that is also an image economy? How do we construct meaning—or resist its construction—inside systems designed to capture and redirect our perception? This is where I post from, curated by Irina Bako, went even further into vernacular digital culture, taking the meme seriously as a form of critical intelligence. The art meme, as the exhibition argued, is art’s cultural nemesis—and also one of its most honest mirrors.

Submerged Narratives worked through field research and artistic residency, connecting the Danube Gorge to the Oslo Fjord, using water as both ecological reality and cultural metaphor. What these projects share is a resistance to the self-contained exhibition as a form. They are processes that become exhibitions, not exhibitions that process ideas.

Your programme also suggests a strong investment in public mediation and in creating contexts that feel socially open and intellectually accessible. How do you think about inclusivity in practice—not only in terms of representation, but also in terms of who feels addressed, welcomed, and able to participate?

I think the most honest answer is that inclusivity has to be structural, not rhetorical. You cannot produce an open exhibition text and consider the work done. The conditions of welcome are physical, temporal, social, and tonal—they involve how a space is lit, who is standing at the door, whether a family with children feels entitled to be there, whether a student from the engineering faculty across the road understands that the gallery is also theirs.

The shift we witnessed at MV sci-art—from students being intimidated by the space to genuinely inhabiting it—didn’t happen because we wrote an inclusivity statement. It happened because we were present, consistently, over time, and because the programme addressed questions those students were already thinking about, even if they hadn’t framed them as art questions.

I am also interested in a kind of intellectual openness that doesn’t flatten difficulty. The works we show are not simplified. The curatorial frameworks are demanding. But difficulty and accessibility are not opposites. An exhibition can be conceptually rigorous and emotionally immediate at the same time. In fact, I think the best ones always are.

Some projects at META Spațiu have addressed questions of queerness, care, ecology, or non-human agency. In your view, how can curatorial work make such topics publicly resonant without reducing them to simplified institutional rhetoric?

By staying close to the artwork and resisting the impulse to use it as illustration.

The risk with any topic that carries a strong institutional consensus—ecology, care, queerness—is that the exhibition becomes a delivery mechanism for positions that are already agreed upon, and the art is simply evidence. That is a form of instrumentalisation, even when the politics are well-intentioned. It produces exhibitions that feel virtuous and inert at the same time.

What I try to do is start from the artistic gesture and let the thematic emerge from it, rather than the reverse. If an artwork genuinely engages with non-human agency—with what it means to think beyond the human as the central reference point—then the curatorial frame has to be built around that specific encounter, not around a predetermined discursive position. The audience should feel that the work is asking them something they don’t already know the answer to.

Uncertainty, I think, is the condition of real resonance. The moment an exhibition settles into its own conclusions, it stops working.

Projects such as This is where I post from or New Tab touch on online visuality, attention economies, memes, and contemporary habits of image consumption. How do you perceive the relationship between contemporary art and digital vernacular culture? Can curating work critically with these forms without simply aestheticizing them?

This is one of the questions I find most genuinely unresolved, which is probably why it keeps appearing in our programme.

What Irina Bako argued through This is where I post from was not simply that memes are interesting cultural material. She was making a more radical claim: that the mem—in its velocity, its collective authorship, its ability to crystallise a shared experience before language has caught up—does something that specialized art criticism, however sophisticated, cannot. The art world has always had gatekeepers. The meme structurally cannot be governed by them.

The risk of bringing this material into a gallery is real. There is a version of that gesture that simply aestheticises the vernacular—elevates it, cleanses it, extracts its energy while neutering its logic. The way we tried to resist that was by keeping the curatorial frame permeable, by not pretending that the gallery is neutral, and by taking the meme’s own critical intelligence seriously rather than using it as decoration.

Digital vernacular culture is not innocent, but it is also not simply a problem for art to solve. It is the primary image environment most people inhabit. An art practice that refuses to engage with it is not purer. It is simply less honest about where it actually exists.

Working in Romania today, how do you perceive the relationship between independent initiatives and public institutions? Is there a productive dialogue between them, or do they still largely operate in parallel worlds?

Parallel worlds, mostly—though the partition is becoming more porous in places, and Timișoara’s year as European Capital of Culture in 2023 accelerated some of those contacts, for better and for worse.

The structural problem is that public institutions in Romania are not primarily designed to be in dialogue. They are designed to administer. This is not a criticism of the individuals within them, many of whom are genuinely engaged; it is a description of the incentive structures. An institution whose primary obligation is the management of public funds and the production of accountable deliverables will always have a complicated relationship with the kind of risk that independent practice requires.

What I’d like to see is not a fusion of the two models—I think the independence of the independent sector is a value worth protecting—but genuine cohabitation: shared audiences, co-productions where both parties actually change as a result of the encounter, and an formal recognition that the independent scene is not a supplementary layer but a primary site of cultural production.

To what extent is curating in the region also a political practice today—not necessarily in the sense of party politics, but in relation to cultural policy, public discourse, social fragmentation, and the pressure placed on the independent scene?

My background gave me a particular relationship to this question. Fifteen years of political journalism instilled a permanent suspicion of systems—of how mechanisms of power impose versions of reality, construct discourse, manage dissent. When I moved into curatorial practice, I carried that suspicion with me. I became, in a sense, an anti-systemic agent in cultural space, just as I had been in political space.

But I’d resist the word “political” for what we do, in favour of something closer to anti-political. Art is political precisely through its refusal to be political in the conventional sense—through its insistence on remaining a space where the terms of the debate are not already set, where the conclusion is not pre-assigned, where the audience is not being managed toward a predetermined response. That is its specific power, and also its specific vulnerability.

What I am certain of is that the pressure on the independent scene is not incidental. The underfunding, the bureaucratic opacity, the indifference of public authorities—these are not mere administrative failures. They are conditions that favour certain kinds of cultural production over others. Being clear-eyed about that is itself a political act, even if the response to it is not.

How do you currently see the Romanian contemporary art scene in relation to the wider region? Where do you sense energy, experimentation, and real change, and where do you still encounter structural limits?

There is real energy, and I think it’s concentrated precisely in the independent organisations—in the places that operate despite the conditions rather than because of them. That is not a romantic observation; it is a structural one. Constraint produces a particular kind of inventiveness.

What I find interesting in the Romanian context specifically is a generation of artists and curators who are no longer oriented primarily toward the West as validation. Not because the West is irrelevant, but because the terms of that orientation have become more available for examination. My own generation grew up with a a psychological emigration that was never quite completed—a mental projection toward Western frameworks that coexisted with, and sometimes obscured, the actual complexity of our own context. I see younger practitioners being more honest about that negotiation.

The structural limits are familiar: an art market that cannot support most practices, an institutional ecology that is still predominantly administrative rather than curatorial, a critical infrastructure that is thin and underfunded. But the conversations are sharper than they were a decade ago. The questions being asked are better questions.

Finally, what are you working on at the moment, and what kinds of curatorial or institutional directions would you most like to develop further in the near future?

I am always, in some sense, working on the same exhibition—or trying to. I don’t look for formally different projects so much as for the same essential question arriving in a new form, through a new voice, through an artistic form strong enough to carry it. What is that essence? It is exactly what cannot be named—the irreducibly human thing that we perceive but cannot describe. That is why they are the visual arts, and that is the precise difficulty for someone who, like me, has spent an entire life thinking in language. The gap between what an image does and what a sentence can say about it is the space I work in.

I want to push further into genuine transdisciplinarity—not art and science as a theme, but as a method. I want to create conditions where a scientist’s way of seeing actually changes an artist’s practice, and vice versa, not just once in a catalogue essay, but structurally, over time.

And I want to keep building trust with artists. Not as a programme ambition, but as the quiet foundation of everything else.

Cover image: Portrait of Mirela Stoeac-Vlăduți. (Photo: Flavius Neamciuc)