Participating Artists and Artist Collectives:
Dan Acostioaei, Matei Bejenaru, Florin Bobu, Radu Carnariu, Alexandra Croitoru, Daniel García Andújar, Ferenc Gróf, Igor Grubić, Oliver Hangl, Leopold Kessler, Tudor Pătrașcu, Dan Perjovschi, Martin Piaček, Tomáš Rafa, Société Réaliste, Ștefan Rusu, Mihai Savin, Mona Vătămanu & Florin Tudor

Curator: Cristian Nae, Assistant Curator: Cristiana Ursache, Exhibition Design: Lavinia German

Opening on 13 November, the international group exhibition “We, the People…” examines the structural fragility of modern democratic sovereignty. Organized by the Institute for Multidisciplinary Research in Art (ICMA), the project maps a network of shared political neuroses across borders, bringing into tension politically and socially engaged artistic practices from a broad Central and Eastern European context and beyond, including Spain, Croatia, Slovakia, Austria, Hungary, the Republic of Moldova, and Romania.
The exhibition offers local audiences a rare opportunity to engage with internationally significant artistic practices. The selection includes works by artists whose work has been collected or presented in exhibitions at major institutions such as MoMA PS1 (New York), MACBA (Barcelona), Tate Modern (London), Centre Pompidou (Paris), Ludwig Múzeum (Budapest), Jeu de Paume (Paris) or Kunsthalle Bratislava, alongside new projects specially adapted by invited artists for the venues in Iași.
The words “We the People,” which open the Preamble to the United States Constitution, have long functioned as a foundational myth of democracy. Today, however, the very idea of “the people” is fractured by fierce struggles over representation, the drawing of political boundaries, and competing forms of political appropriation. Co-opted by nationalist and right-wing conservative narratives, the community — imagined as homogeneous — has become an instrument of identity-based mobilization and exclusion. Against a backdrop of compounding economic crises, wars, and social precarity, revanchist and authoritarian rhetoric has increasingly reclaimed the public sphere. In Romania, the Constitutional Court’s decision of December 6, 2024, to annul the entire electoral process for the election of the President of Romania brought into sharp relief the deep divide between progressive and sovereigntist-conservative imaginaries. Democracy itself is caught in this collision: fragile, contested, and vulnerable.
Steering between professed neutrality and moralizing pedagogy, the curatorial approach takes shape as an agonistic apparatus: a space in which antagonisms are laid bare and brought into tension, without the false promise of easy reconciliation. The spatial density of the works, the collision of visual registers, and the auditory cacophony turn Aparte Gallery and tranzit ro/Iași into fields of sensory pressure. Populist rhetoric, fantasies of national purity, and patriotic tropes encroach upon the exhibition spaces, intersect, and clash, leaving visitors with little comfort in the position of the detached spectator.
The exhibition offers neither an alternative collective identity nor the redemptive myth of a recovered consensus. Instead, it functions as a compression chamber for our collective political neuroses—a site where images, gestures, and voices crowd together, interfere with one another, and render palpable the profound crisis unsettling democratic life.

Project organized by The Institute for Multidisciplinary Research in Art (ICMA) and tranzit ro/ Iași.