Opened in October 2024 and still on display in the generous space of Kunsthalle Bega until March 15, 2025, the international group exhibition “Land of Fire” stands as a decolonial manifesto. Drawing on new perspectives of cultural globalization (Appadurai) and horizontal history (Piotrowski), it calls for a reevaluation of concepts such as identity essentialism, the nation-state, localization, exclusion, center-periphery dynamics, and exoticization. This project is a collaborative endeavor, bringing together a strong curatorial team composed of Cosmin Costinaș (recipient of the Bega Art Prize 2021, curator at Haus der Kulturen der Welt, Berlin, and in 2022, curator of the Kathmandu Triennale “KT 2077”), alongside the duo Mona Vătămanu & Florin Tudor. The exhibition also features an impressive lineup of artists, including: Claudia Andujar, Florin Bobu, Alex Bodea, Chet Kumari Chitrakar, Tony Chakar, Ana Deji, Megan Dominescu, Mihaela Drăgan, Ion Dumitrescu, Chitra Ganesh, Alexandra Gulea, Loredana Ilie, Sakarin Krue-On, Ivana Mladenović, Nicoleta Moise, Silvia Moldovan, Elisabeta and Emilia Morar, Veda Popovici & Mircea Nicolae, Maria Prodan, Citra Sasmita, Ștefan Sava, Ultima Esperanza, Sana Shahmuradova Tanska, Robel Temesgen, Hans Mattis-Teusch, Mona Vătămanu & Florin Tudor, Mark Verlan, Cecilia Vicuña, Apichatpong Weerasethakul, and Cristina Zárraga.

Standing out as a necessary critical debate in today’s world, one deeply affected by political shifts toward the far right, armed conflicts, the resurgence of imperialist ambitions, and colonialist policies, the exhibition was accompanied by an extensive program of discussions which involved the curators, artists, and a series of special guests who explored pressing issues within the contemporary cultural scene: the rise and fall of national mythologies, anticolonial healing strategies, artistic practices, history, nature and control, the histories of marginalized art and their potential.

In this context, the values embraced by the curators – duty, integrity, responsibility, communication, collaboration, and solidarity- recall Dan Perjovschi’s initiative Generosity, Regeneration, Transparency, Independence, Sufficiency, Local Anchor and most of all Humor, in which he inscribed the columns of the Fridericianum Museum with the lumbung imperatives selected for documenta 15 by the Indonesian curatorial collective ruangrupa (the first collective curatorship in documenta’s history and the second non-European curatorship after Okwui Enwezor in 2002). A closer look reveals that “Land of Fire” aligns closely with the broader vision of ruangrupa’s project in Kassel, not only through its promotion of non-western art, non-commercial artistic works such as image or document archives and the critical-educational dimension of artistic practice, but also through its ambition to move beyond the typically European image of the individualist artist in constant competition (with others, with time).

The exhibition at Kunsthalle Bega is also in line with the last two curatorial programs of the Venice Biennale – “The Milk of Dreams” (2022, curated by Cecilia Alemani) and especially “Foreigners Everywhere” (2024, curated by Adriano Pedrosa)– both of which provided a space as well as a voice to disadvantaged groups associated with the image of the so-called Other, be they women artists, artists of color or from the Global South, LGBTQ activists, migrants, refugees, exiles, and others. The latter exhibition also sought to critique the very concept of the national pavilion by reallocating national spaces to marginalized cultures or ethnic minority communities.

The complex of works and debates associated with “Land of Fire” thus aims to initiate a critique of identity essentialism and exclusion while also exposing the power relations and inequalities embedded in the discourse of dominant cultures and, by extension, transmitted to marginalized cultures. The exhibition seeks to move beyond all forms of eurocentrism and to reveal the possibility of articulating a “local” identity outside the frameworks imposed by dominant narratives. This is exemplified by the impressive installation Timur Merah VII: Divina Comedia by Balinese artist Citra Sasmita, an expansive and expressive traditional Kamasan canvas, painted in acrylic and accompanied by an unexpected animation that reinterprets its motifs, bringing them to life. Displayed at the center of the hall in a suspended position that evokes the movement of a boat, the canvas can be read as a symbol of migration but also of journeys toward transcendent realms. It resists any form of exoticization, exposing myths and forced interpretations of Balinese culture while scrutinizing preconceptions about male heroism and the normative construction of gender. Similarly, Cristina Zárraga’s linocuts inspired by scenes from Yamana mythology, strive to revitalize the culture of Tierra del Fuego, which also ring true for the series of hand-painted prints by Chet Kumari Chitrakar, created for the Nāga Panchami festival in the Kathmandu Valley Nepal, a vernacular art form traditionally practiced by women, now overlooked and increasingly replaced by cheap imported prints.

To this end, the exhibition explores which genres, languages, media, and artistic genealogies have been excluded from dominant art histories that have been used to construct the self-image of nations. Alongside international examples, one can also consider the case of Orthodox reverse-glass icons from 18th and 19th century Transylvania, many of which were created by women artists at a time when they were largely excluded from a profession reserved for men across Europe. Another relevant case is the history of Transylvanian carpets, which were produced in Muslim countries, collected in Transylvania, and depicted in European paintings, testifying to the complexity of exchange networks within the global colonial economy.

A significant number of works by Romanian artists join those described above, exploring both recent tendencies of self-colonization and Romania’s possible participation in Europe’s colonial program. As the curators state, the exhibition begins with a few lesser-known historical episodes in order to investigate the dual line of exclusion, affecting historical discourse and shaping the history of art itself. This approach raises questions such as: which groups, along with their stories, images, and perspectives, have been excluded from Romania’s self-imagining process? What events buried in the depths of history continue to be silenced? In this context, key chapters of Romania’s history are brought into discussion, including centuries of Roma enslavement, the colonization of the Southern Dobruja (Cadrilater), the occupation of Transnistria, and the genocide of roma and jewish communities. Alongside the ethnic groups addressed (in the works of Ștefan Sava, Mihaela Drăgan, Alexandra Gulea etc), the exhibition also highlights marginalized social groups such as miners, who have been either ignored or politically instrumentalized (as seen in Alexandra Gulea’s second film and the paintings of Mattis-Teusch).

However, the exhibition’s focal point is the research into Romania’s involvement in the broader European colonial project, centered on the figure of explorer Iuliu Popper. Despite his participation in the genocide of the indigenous Selk’nam people in Tierra del Fuego, Popper has been praised in Romanian school textbooks and even honored by the socialist regime in the 1980s with a commemorative stamp. As both curators and artists, Mona Vătămanu and Florin Tudor directly contribute to this research with their film They All Became Birds, inspired by a little-known album dedicated to Tierra del Fuego which includes photographs of Popper on so-called “indian hunts,” rifle in hand, surrounded by a small army. The artists subtly reveal a series of overlooked insights, such as the fact that these late 19th-century snapshots depicting the group of conquistadors were undoubtedly staged, constructed. Another striking detail is that the entire album lacks even a single image of a living indigenous person. Through their investigation, the artists reveal the colonialist trope of the Americas as nobody’s land and critique the legal justification that europeans employed to dispossess indigenous territories according to the so-called “doctrine of discovery”. Following in the footsteps of Edward Said, their project uncovers the discursive strategies through which colonial superiority and rationality were constructed in opposition to the perceived immaturity and primitivism of the colonized culture, and ultimately, they reject exoticism as an imposed, staged narrative shaped by the conquistador’s fantasies (escapist temptations, the obsession with gold etc).

The subject is further explored in adjacent projects, such as Megan Dominescu’s ironic hand-woven tapestries depicting portraits of Popper and other explorers worthy of national pride, thus highlighting the broader need for a critical postcolonial reassessment of the entire program of European geographic discoveries and expeditions, which began during the Renaissance and continued into the 20th century.

The critique of vertical, subjective geographies is also poetically reinterpreted in the striking textile work of young Timișoara-based artist Loredana Ilie. Her piece is a large-scale imaginary map (4 x 8 meters) adorned with medieval symbols and markings. Its title –Hic Svnt Dracones– references the European explorers’ practice of associating the unknown with danger, specifically by marking uncharted territories with dragons and other fearsome mythical creatures. Once again, the exhibition exposes the negative valuation of the so-called Other, different and unknown, within the Western epistemological framework, which prioritizes rationality and enforces hierarchies and typologies onto indigenous cultures. Displayed at the center of the exhibition hall, mirroring Timur Merah VII from Bali, a piece symbolizing a journey into real or imagined unknown lands, Hic Svnt Dracones also evokes the image of a ship’s sail. At the same time, it can be interpreted as a metaphor for uncharted mental spaces and collective fears.

The metaphor of the journey and migration renews the discourse on new ways of interpreting identity (as a multiple, fluid entity), as well as on the notions of place and locality, which according to Arjun Appadurai, has become more of a phenomenological and relational quality that characterizes social life rather than a stable geographic feature or a spatial, scalar characteristic.

Multiplicity and multiculturalism also define Ștefan Sava’s installation, composed of fragments of pottery and wax cylinders, which brings into focus the figure of the renowned German ethnologist Leo Frobenius, an explorer of the African continent that spent a year in Romania between 1916 and 1917, traveling alongside the German army. It is also revealed that Frobenius conducted excavations in Slobozia, as an amateur archaeologist assisted by a team of African prisoners, uncovering a series of artifacts from the Gumelnița culture which were later sold to a museum in Berlin.

The ten bizarre objects that comprise the installation, wax cylinders with ceramic teeth, inhabit a territory that emerges at the intersection of industrial objects, fossils, and hand-made artistic items. Their hybrid structure recalls Frobenius’s conception of culture as a living organism and meta-entity, while simultaneously revealing the wax, a versatile organic material that breathes and easily changes its properties, as a metaphysical revelation (who could forget Descartes’s experiment with the piece of wax that laid the foundation for all rationalisms) and also as the unique method of recording sound in Frobenius’s time. Last but not least, the installation draws attention to the lack of rationality in history, driving nationalist narratives to absurdity: a German archaeologist used African labor to excavate the Bărăgan for prehistoric artifacts of a local culture, which he then took to the empire where they were ultimately lost due to a bombardment.

The final step, from multiculturalism to cultural difference and hybridization, is taken by Ion Dumitrescu in an intermedia project that comprises, under the title Balcanibalim, an essay as well as a video-dance work. The critique of the way in which hybrid musical genres remain a controversial subject in Romania today is supported by an exercise in articulating an inter-balkan, trans-border identity that transcends any elitist attempt to define ethnocentric cultural particularities. In this regard, the project promotes a broader critique regarding the forced exoticization of the Balkans and the denigration of lăutărească music, also targeting the philosopher Constantin Noica, whose interpretation “rejects any form of democratization of art, pop, or wedding music, and falsely associates lăutăria with dilettantism.”

The exhibition space thus emerges as one of difference and hybridization, initiating the dissolution of boundaries, hierarchies, and dichotomies, and redefining cultural identity in the spirit of Homi Bhabha, as a fluctuating and heterogeneous product born from the convergence of multiple cultures. In the era of post-colonialism, post-cinema, and post-photography, hybridization blends with transgression and transmediality, justifying the presence of filmmakers in the exhibition: Alexandra Gulea, Ivana Mladenović, and Apichatpong Weerasethakul, already a familiar figure in galleries and even an invitee to the Venice Biennale. The fantastic short film he presents in “Land of Fire”, Phantoms of Nabua, explores the dual nature of fire as both creator and destroyer, set against the backdrop of a game involving incandescent balls played by the locals of Nabua: a site of confrontations between Thailand’s military dictatorship governments and communist agrarian communities. Without a doubt, the work placed right at the entrance can serve as both a prologue and an epilogue to the discourse.