Exhibition AGIR DANS SON LIEU — SĂCEL, Anca Poterașu Gallery, 27 February – 16 April 2026

Artists:

Ioana Cîrlig, Morgane Denzler, Andreea Medar, Aurelia Mihai, Ilie Mihali, Ileana Mihali, Delia Popa, Maria Poterașu, Damien Rouxel

Curated by: Julie Crenn

Opening: Friday, 27 February 2026, 6–9 PM

Anca Poterașu Gallery

26 Popa Soare Street, Bucharest

Anca Poterasu Gallery and the Romanian Association of Contemporary Art (ARAC), presents Agir dans son lieu, a group exhibition opening Friday, 27 February, 6–9 PM. The show brings contemporary art into dialogue with the traditional crafts from Săcel, Maramureș.

The exhibition features artists from the ARAC residency in Săcel (2025)—including Morgane Denzler, Damien Rouxel, Delia Popa, Ioana Cîrlig, Andreea Medar, and Ilie Mihali—alongside invited artists and practitioners whose work engages with local material culture and craft traditions. On view are works created during the residency, as well as new and earlier pieces that explore the fragility of subsistence practices, the interdependence of human, animal, and material life, and the cultural, ethical, and ecological decisions shaping rural landscapes.

Agir dans son lieu is a long-term curatorial project initiated in 2016 by Julie Crenn, combining research, residencies, and exhibitions that explore relationships between artists and peasant environments. The title literally means “acting from one’s own place” articulates a mode of situated practice, attentive to historical, cultural, and ecological contexts, and responsive to the lived experience of the place.

“Throughout the history of Western art, the figures of the peasant and the peasant woman have undergone an essentialization that endures in the collective imagination. In the latter, the representation seems unchanging. Yet, since the 1960s, we no longer speak of a peasant world, but rather of peasant environments in the plural, inhabited by actors who make choices about the way they do their jobs. Political, militant, strategic and economic choices that lead them down two paths: that of exploitation or that of reciprocity. The former the living world as a short-term resource designed for maximum yield; the latter, which is as reasoned as it is reasonable, applies a sustainable approach to the living world. The first leads to an agriculture without a farmer, an agriculture out of the soil; the second to a physical, ethical and political reconnection with one's environment. “Farming without a farmer is not just a problem of the countryside becoming desertified; it's also a matter of the disappearance of a profession and, with that profession, of the body of knowledge and know-how that founded the fundamental link to the living world that peasants and farmers have held in trust for millennia, on behalf of society.” So, from farmer to peasant, the professions are not the same, nor is the relationship with time and the land.” (Excerpt from the curatorial text)

The ARAC Art Residency in Săcel (2025) was co-financed by the Ministry of Culture

Partners: Institutul Francez București, Săcel Town Hall, Săcel School, Bodori Design Studio, Săcel Local Council, Maramureș County