This is an exhibition of mine from 2011. Parrhesia was about speaking without filters, when words failed. I wanted to share my bed and my thoughts with others — not from above, but from the ground. My bed, my world, was down there. If you wanted to see me, you had to sit down too.

In the performance, I bandaged my wounds and invited the audience to do the same. Not through noise, not through speeches, but in silence. Quiet. While I cleaned the ground, I offered the only space I had: my bed on the floor. A place of exposure, of fatigue, of confession without words.

It was not about comfort. It was about stripping away the distance between private and public, body and audience. About sharing fragility without disguises, about making silence itself into a dialogue.

Cătălin Soreanu, curator

The analogy between parrhesia, as a form of discursive expression, and Emanuela Boros’s artistic approach is reflected in the intimate and personal nature of the construction specific to her installations, while the absence of rhetorical artifices and the openness to critique become the premises of dialogue between artist and public. In Emanuela Boros’s project, the discursive form of parrhesia acquires expressive and artistic connotations: speech for a political cause becomes a private, personal, introspective act, grounded in openness and self-examination; the agora becomes the bed; the sphere of the public becomes that of the private—a private space that invokes, for each visitor, a fundamental experience of the self, an autobiographical confession in which self-critical subjectivization is the main driving force of the artistic endeavor.

Immersed in the dialogue proposed by the artist, the public is induced into a state of self-interrogation that addresses the relationship between one’s private identity and its social projection (the public self). Thus, Emanuela Boros directly connects her own personal space with the concept of its public definition, related to the personal experience of each visitor. The relationship between spectators or participants and the artistic installation is emphasized by the distinction between the projected personal spaces of each participant, through active reactions such as repulsion, confusion, compassion, or pain. The authenticity of the project’s elements demands a distinct type of cognitive response from viewers, in an interactive dialogue that unfolds through positioning, movement, or gaze.

The project seeks to transpose, at the level of a dialogue between author/installation and reader/participant, an interactive form of artistic expression through which Emanuela Boros engages in a visual-discursive, self-reflexive practice. The intentional state of uncertainty, whose generated confusion enhances the introspective conditions of the artistic experience, creates a contextual space in which the relational, participatory dimension of the public’s presence is highlighted.

Emanuela Boros, Visual artist

Author of the exhibition Parrhesia, she is a Master’s student in the Photo-Video-Computerized Image Processing program at the George Enescu University of Arts, Iași.

Lavinia German, Coordinator

Coordinator of the exhibition Parrhesia, Lavinia is an Assistant Professor, PhD, at the George Enescu University of Arts, Iași, Faculty of Fine Arts, Decorative Arts and Design, Photo-Video-Computerized Image Processing program.

Cătălin Soreanu, Curator

Graduate in Graphics from the George Enescu University of Arts, Iași, Faculty of Fine Arts, Decorative Arts and Design, Cătălin is completing his artistic training in the Master’s program in Art History and Theory at the same university.

Photos belong to the George Enescu University of Arts.