Design Art Papers 2025 | No. 13

Fig. 4 / Image from the exhibition „ Utopian Body ” or representational manner, Ciobanu dissects and reconfigures it as an unfinished architecture composed of traces, ruins, and speculative extensions. His use of fragmented anatomical forms, skeletal structures, and shadow-like silhouettes constructed from acrylic on canvas challenges the viewer to perceive the body not as unity but as a spatial condition. The curatorial framework that I proposed in the exhibition does not function as a simple selection of works, but as an embodied space. I organized the space so that the viewer traverses a path among suspended torsos, areas of light that open up voids, and surfaces that oscillate between the organicity of the skin and the rigidity of the wall, generating a permanent tension between intimacy andmonumentality. Rather than foregrounding the object, I choose the curatorial design to emphasize movement, distance, and hesitation thereby transforming the gallery into a perceptual corridor between corporeality and space. Lighting played a central role in the exhibition’s design. Shadows deliberately obscured sections of the work, staging the body as an apparition rather than a stable form. Textual components were used sparingly but decisively. Instead of traditional explanatory labels, short conceptual fragments were inscribed onto the walls. These curatorial decisions reinforced Foucault’s assertion that the body is both „here” and „elsewhere,” a visible trace of an invisible absence. [3] Furthermore, the choreography of viewing was deliberately slowed. The works were installed with substantial spatial intervals, compelling the gaze to travel across emptiness before reaching another corporeal fragment. This spatial delay echoed the philosophical delay that Foucault identifies between the body as physical certainty and the body as utopian projection. [4] In doing so, Utopian Body did not merely exhibit the body, it curated the conditions under which the body could be sensed as both historical and speculative, fragile and transcendent. The exhibition ultimately enacted a curatorial translation of Foucault’s thesis: that the body is the first and last place, the most intimate and the most distant of all utopias. Ciobanu’s work renders the body architectural, situating it within the memory of walls, the silence of plaster, and the displacement of light. The result is not an exhibition about the body, but an exhibition in which the body becomes a spatial method, a way of thinking, dwelling, and imagining. TheexhibitionUtopianBody canbe situatedwithinbroader discourses in curatorial theory that frame curation as an expanded form of authorship and spatial thinking. Scholars such as Paul O’Neill and Beatrice von Bismarck argue that the curator is no longer a neutral mediator between artwork and audience but an active producer of meaning, constructing relationships, temporalities, and forms of knowledge. [5] In this perspective, curating becomes a spatial practice in itself, an epistemological framework that organizes bodies, objects, images, and ideas within a field of relations. WithinthecontextofCiobanu’sexhibition,myroleascurator was not to simply arrange works, but to choreograph an encounter between embodiment andmemory. The gallery space functioned as a discursive site where the materiality of the building, the traces of human form, and the viewer’s movement intersected to generate meaning. This aligns with Irit Rogoff’s notion of „embodied spectatorship,” 281 280 / / / / Caiete de Arte și Design / nr. 13 / 2025 / / / / Publicație a Centrului de Cercetare și Creație în Artele Decorative și Design / / / / / / / / / / / / / / / / / / / / / / / / / / / / / / / / / / / / / / / / / / / / / / / / / / / / / / / / / / / / / / / / / / / / / / / / / / / / / / / / / / / / / / / / / / / / / / / / / / / / / / / / / / / / / / / / / / / / / / / / / / / / / / / / / / / / / / / / / / / / / / / / / / / / / / / / / / / / / / / / / / / / / / / / / / / / / / / / / / / / / / / / / / / / / / / / / / / / / / / / / / / / / / / / / / / / / / / / / / / / / / / / / /