Additional info:
Working across analogue photography, social observation and performative self positioning, Virginia Lupu has developed a practice centred on communities rarely granted complex visibility within Romanian visual culture. Her artistic formation took shape while studying at the National University of Arts in Bucharest, and her early projects were presented in Hansel Loves Gretel at the Centre of Visual Arts, Bucharest, in 2015, followed by tossing and turning, crushing and teasing, breaking and shaping at Suprainfinit Gallery in 2016. Lupu’s photographic language remains direct and materially restrained, favouring proximity, trust and sustained access over staged representation. Her work with Bucharest’s transgender community and later with Roma witches examines marginality, intimacy, belief and the social codes through which bodies are read. Projects such as Tintintin and Failproof Witch address occult practices, female authority and matriarchal knowledge without turning their subjects into ethnographic spectacle. In 2019, Failproof Witch was presented at NW Aalst in Belgium, in collaboration with Mihaela Minca and curated by Anca Rujoiu. More recent projects, including Female gaze on sexuality and femininity at Is This Art? Gallery in Bucharest in 2023, extend her interest in sexuality, labour, power relations and the politics of looking.
