This summer, at Salonul de Proiecte, I was delighted to discover a tale of friendship curated by Magda Radu and Alexandra Croitoru, and carefully framed historically by Diana Mărgărit and Adrian Cioflâncă. “Travels, Photographs, Friendships” traces the unexpected connections between three creators, American surrealist photographer Lee Miller, visual artist Lena Constante, and set designer and activist Elena Pătrășcanu, against the backdrop of World War II. The exhibition proposes the useful metaphor of the knot to untangle and reweave the fabric of this narrative: historical knots, knots of friendship, physical knots that make up Lena Constante’s textile works, present in the exhibition, or those that tie Elena Pătrășcanu’s puppets, captured in candid images by Lee Miller. Miller herself is a historical and artistic knot, marked by Man Ray, Jean Cocteau, Roland Penrose, with whom she first arrived in Romania, and Harry Brauner, the brother of painter Victor Brauner, Lena Constante’s husband and her host in Romania. 

Her photographs are the highlight of the exhibition and, together with illustrations, textile art pieces, newspaper clippings, magazines, and letters, reveal the interpersonal connections – whether artistic, political, or personal – of a friendship that transcended ideological and geographical boundaries in times of repression and uncertainty. The emphasis on human connection, rather than mere aesthetic objectivity, gave the exhibition a unique perspective, where history is not so much about isolated facts or images as it is about relationships that endure, evolve, or quietly disappear with the passage of time. 

This makes the curators’ effort to reconstruct these lives and connections from fragmentary archives, which requires detective work, all the more remarkable. This work has materialised in a map of friendship and key moments that are often invisible in traditional art histories. This gesture of “mapping friendship” recovers works, but also relationships, and invites viewers to reflect on how personal and political histories intertwine, and how sisterhood can become an act of resistance and survival. However, these connections are not idealised: Elena’s marriage to communist leader Lucrețiu Pătrășcanu ultimately led to her arrest, as well as that of Lena Constante and Harry Brauner, who were accused of complicity; the four formed a united group of ideological affinities and artistic collaborations. “Travels, Photographs, Friendships” remains an eloquent example of relational curating – a form of care for omitted histories, an exercise that brings to light the complexity of the lives of artists from that era.

This curatorial approach has echoes across Europe and reminded me of another exhibition which, although presented differently, has similar discursive implications. In “Silver Girls. Retouched History of Photography” at the National Art Gallery in Vilnius, curators Agnė Narušytė, Jurga Daubaraitė, and Natalija Arlauskaitė took on the same task: they revisited archives, rediscovered overlooked careers, and analysed how female photographers coped with professional and political pressures in 20th-century Baltic societies. Unlike the exhibition at Salonul de Proiecte, “Silver Girls” focuses on women who worked in official institutions (press agencies, photo studios, often in the shadow of male figures) in a regime where artistic visibility could be both a privilege and a risk. However, the impulse is the same: the story of resilience and personal autonomy of artists whose works have long been marginalised or anonymised.

What emerges is less a common narrative and more a shared curatorial attitude. Both projects are concerned with how we read and write history in the present, and both demonstrate that recovering the trajectories of female artists requires an intersectional approach (art history, political studies, archival research, storytelling) that is nuanced beyond its narrative simplicity. Instead of reducing these figures to generalised symbols of resistance or romanticising them, we discover the sometimes ambivalent roles that a number of artists played in the context of oppressive regimes. Moreover, we are reminded that, especially in Eastern Europe, networks of female artists, with their stories obscured by political ruptures, censorship, and ideological bias, are still subjects of great interest. Thus, the exhibition “Travels, Photographs, Friendships” is part of a broader trend of curatorial reconstruction in the form of a narrative that intertwines art, politics, and people. It does not offer a conclusion or a solution, but it suggests that there are other histories to be unearthed, both for curators and historians, as well as for the general public.

“Travels, Photographs, Friendships.” Curators: Alexandra Croitoru, Magda Radu  [Salonul de Proiecte, Bucharest, April 24–June 8, 2025]