Time Is a Flat Circle
Galeria Aparte, Faculty of Visual Arts and Design, Iași
15–22 December 2025
(Opening: 15 December 2025, 6:00–9:00 PM)
Artists: Sabina Benescu, Andrei Botnaru, Dumitrița Gurău, Cătălin Marinescu, Radu Marțin
Curator: Lorena Marciuc
Exhibition design: Matei Bejenaru
Curatorial Statement
The exhibition Time Is a Flat Circle is grounded in the idea that time no longer operates as a flow — implicitly implying development or succession — but is instead perceived as a form of recurrence. Since the exhibition space deliberately functions as an ontological demonstration, the curatorial experiment seeks to construct a framework in which time is affirmed in its most austere form: a circularity without becoming, visible in the constant repetition of the same conceptual structure.
In this sense, the exhibition reverses Quentin Meillassoux’s logic of the absolute contingency. If, for Meillassoux, nothing guarantees the continuity of laws or temporal stability, the exhibition deliberately acts in the opposite direction: it suppresses difference in favor of a proliferation of the possible. Each artwork therefore reiterates the same concept in order to demonstrate the existence of a conceptual invariant that precedes material diversity, whether it appears through the transparency of plexiglass (Benescu), through algorithmic aestheticization (Botnaru), through replicated urban modularities (Gurău), through repetitive bodily gestures (Marinescu), or through a perspectivally reframed processuality (Marțin).
Materially constructed recurrence critically reactivates the Deleuzian logic of repetition. While repetition is commonly associated with the opening of difference, this experiment restricts that opening in order to highlight that, here, difference is reduced to the accidental level of the material support. Image and object are instances of the same concept; variation of medium is mobilized only to demonstrate that the idea remains identical regardless of the substance that carries it.
From a Heideggerian perspective, the works are treated as beings in a regime of stasis. They are beings maintained in recurrence, intentionally held in a state of insistence, without interpretative horizon and, above all, without progression. The exhibition thus deliberately suspends hermeneutic potential in order to privilege the perception of how the idea persists.
The condition of the artist is integrated as an example of the same recurrent structure, in order to emphasize the ontologically iterative character of the creative process. Practice — whether translated into repetitive gestures of building and dismantling (Marinescu) or into the exhausting, almost imperceptible labor of the creative process (Marțin) — appears as an internal instance of return, detached from the imperative of producing novelty. The artist is thus inscribed within the same monadic logic: repeating the same idea because variation is programmatically suspended in favor of manifesting a single, non-evolutionary concept. Recurrence becomes, in this context, a way of exposing the internal mechanisms of creation, not of diminishing them.
Likewise, technologically mediated works (Botnaru) and those that duplicate architectural images (Gurău) present continuous visual differences, but these are pseudo-differences: variations of the support that maintain the identity of the structure. Reflections on plexiglass (Benescu) become visual markers of the same limit, regardless of the body that touches it.
The exposure of the temporal mechanism itself deconstructs montage and narrative, proposing an “ontological loop” in which what is repeated is precisely the fact of repetition. The exhibition space thus functions as a film without unfolding, a fixed frame that consolidates the formal continuity of the concept.
In Time Is a Flat Circle, time is treated as that which returns to itself without producing novelty. By reiterating the same idea across incompatible materialities, the exhibition suspends any interpretative possibility and compels the viewer to perceive the identity of the concept as identity, far from symbol or theme.
Time is no longer consumed. It repeats itself, and through this repetition, any possible world is suspended, leaving visible only the structure that insists.
A project developed within the Doctoral School of Visual Arts, “George Enescu” National University of Arts in Iași, in partnership with FLOW DEVELOPMENT and with the support of the Center for Applied Aesthetics and Research-Based Practices (CeAR) and Vector Studio.
Research-based exhibition project supported by CNFIS, through project CNFIS-FDI-2025-F-0091.
Doctoral supervisors:
Prof. Matei Bejenaru, PhD
Prof. Cătălin Gheorghe, PhD
Prof. Cristian Nae, PhD
Prof. Atena-Elena Simionescu, PhD
Prof. Adrian Stoleriu, PhD
