”The exhibition experiment Internet of (Living) Things. At the Boundary of the Object, Toward the Edge of the Human [Io(L)T], situated—using the language of quantum physics—in a state of superposition, where the curator relinquishes the role of observer, paradoxically simulates a set of non-observational positions. ”
Andrei Botnaru, Cătălin Marinescu, Radu Marțin, Marian Mina Mihai
Curators: Lorena Marciuc
January 22 – February 5, 2026
Anca Poterașu Gallery, Bucharest
Between the preset of a distanced gaze and the assumption of the wave function’s presence within the exercise of exhibition production, the works by Andrei Botnaru, Cătălin Marinescu, Radu Marțin, and Marian Mina Mihai construct laboratory-like situations that become instruments for perceptual, conceptual, and affective probing of the limits of a reality in which the human entity transforms into either a disruptive factor or a catalyst in interaction with other bodies, translating invisible data into sensitive cartographies. By surpassing the boundaries between object and subject through installations that encourage contact, reaction, and the displacement of everyday order, Io(L)T also hybridizes the exhibition space with that of the bazaar, the playground, the garden, and the forest, inviting visitors to reconsider their encounter with materiality and the specificity of objects as a discontinuous flow of re-signification.
Io(L)T thus becomes an alternation between presence and non-presence, since an exhibition event could not establish meaning in the absence of the viewer who intervenes, interacts, listens, and imagines in relation to the works. The processual character of the exhibition transcends the status of a simple narrative configuration, collapsing the need to perceive a “single” meaning and proposing instead a multiverse that invites.
Having a status of in-betweenness, Io(L)T borrows from the practice referred to by Doreen Mende as inhibition—a critical reaction to Tony Bennett’s exhibitionary complex—in order to turn inside out the gesture of exhibition, one that would otherwise inscribe a power relation.
The blinding, reflective white cube inscribed within an affective black box functions as a mechanism of abstraction and, at the same time, of explicating an aesthetic experience with permeable boundaries. The cube, having two reflective faces, doubles both spaces—the blinding curatorial one and the affective one that supports the exhibited works within a significantly doubled corridor of representation.
