DAMAGED GOODS | Group show

The exhibition DAMAGED GOODS takes its cue from the language of capitalist commerce, where objects are evaluated, classified, and discarded when they no longer meet standards of utility or perfection. In this economic vocabulary, “damaged goods” are those items considered defective, worn out, or compromised—products that can no longer circulate effectively within the system of value.

 

By applying this logic to the body, the exhibition investigates how, in late capitalism and the society of the spectacle, the body becomes simultaneously a commodity and an image. It is no longer merely a tool of labor, but an exposed, sexualized, optimized, and visually consumed surface. The body is produced to be looked at, desired, monetized—and discarded when it no longer conforms to dominant codes of attractiveness, health, or performance. In this economy of the visible, fetishization functions as a central mechanism: skin, hair, flesh, and gesture are fragmented and transformed into objects of consumption. The body no longer exists as a whole, but as the sum of exploitable surfaces. The gaze is no longer neutral—it classifies, hierarchizes, extracts value.

Deterioration appears here as a breaking point. It marks the moment when the body escapes the control of the image and the market—when it becomes too much, too tired, too real. The damaged body is the body that can no longer be aestheticized without residue, that refuses to be consumed without friction. Damaged Goods refuses to treat this deterioration as a failure. Instead, it reclaims it as a form of resistance and as evidence of the pressures exerted on the body. It is not about healing or repair, but about exposing the mechanisms that cause wear and tear.

 

The first room functions as a space of forced proximity: the body is brought close, reduced to skin, texture, flesh—exactly where it becomes easiest to consume visually. In his work, Alex Mirutziu constructs the image of a body suspended between the sacred and decay: a fallen, incomplete “angel,” supported by plaster casts, which exposes fragility as a form of resistance against the ideal of integrity. Cosmin Haiaș’s work directly destabilizes the logic of consumption: wearing a pig’s belly becomes a violent symbolic gesture, in which the human body and the animal body merge, brutally exposing the mechanisms of exploitation and fetishization of meat. In Le Citoyen, Virgilius Moldovan presents a body at the limit of visual endurance: a hyperrealistic baby that nullifies the aestheticization of innocence and exposes corporeality in its raw, unsettling form. Guadalupe Aldrete situates the female body within a realm of origin and continuity, yet without idealizing it: in her video, the body appears as ancestral terrain, not as a consumer object, rejecting spectacular aesthetics. In contrast, Marina Oprea proposes an impossible transformation: the body that aspires to become crystal remains caught between the desire for purification and the impossibility of escaping materiality. Eva Maria Schartmüller’s installation—made of collected human hair and the image of a woman with cancer—directly challenges the aesthetics of seduction: the body becomes vulnerable, exposed in its state of loss, rejecting any form of idealization. In the same vein, Adrian Oncu, through Adriana Diamond, places the queer body behind a grille—an image of control, but also of the performativity of identity, where exposure becomes simultaneously captivity and affirmation.

 

Entering the second room involves an uncomfortable gesture: the audience steps over the image of two queer bodies—Adrian Oncu and his twin brother—embraced, naked, in a fragile balance. Intimacy becomes surface, and the viewer is directly involved in the act of crossing. The second room abandons the logic of the surface and enters an unstable space, where the body is no longer fixed but becomes fluid, hybrid, sometimes completely absorbed. Robert Reszner introduces a boat in which the body is caught in a repetitive gesture of movement—an effort without a clear end, between control and drifting. In The Lace, Josépha Blanchet envelops the female body in an ambiguous materiality: lace functions simultaneously as ornament and as a mechanism of constraint, while the image of the body overgrown with vegetation suggests a loss of control over one’s own form. Mathias Bar’s paintings draw on mythological imagery to explore the monstrous and otherness: Lamia and Mirror Twins destabilize identity, transforming it into an experience of duality and distortion. Emilia Jagica reconstructs bodies from historical erotic images, nullifying fetishization through exaggeration and recombination: the bodies become androgynous, unstable, impossible to pin down to a single gender or function. In Mirela Cerbu’s pictorial universe, the body disappears into a saturated symbolic landscape—snakes, flowers, cosmic forms—where the real and the imaginary blend without hierarchy. Sorin Scurtulescu’s works convey an apparent calm, yet one that is tense: irises rendered almost graphically, in dialogue with Eva Maria Schartmüller’s object—the T-shirt made of trash bags inscribed with “I am a compost” and “I am a dirt bag”—where the body is reduced to matter, to a cycle, to decomposition.

 

DAMAGED GOODS does not offer a space for reconciliation, but one for critical exposure. The bodies in this exhibition are neither healed, nor saved, nor aestheticized for the viewer’s comfort. They remain uncomfortable, fragmented, sometimes excessive. Deterioration is no longer a defect, but a refusal: the refusal to become a perfect image, the refusal to be consumed without a trace, the refusal to disappear into the logic of the spectacle.