''My Father'' - Ioana Cîrlig

The intervention ''My Father'' took place in October 2025, in the space where the FAUR factory once stood. The artist’s father had worked there for forty years, until the factory was closed during the privatisation process. The work functions as a farewell ritual and a revisiting of shared memories from that space, which the artist used to visit gladly as a child.

After the father’s passing, the artist requested access to his file in the Securitate archives and discovered more about his life and the daily pressures he and his colleagues faced under a system that demanded everyone share opinions about one another. These “opinions” were often officially presented as facts beginning with formulations such as “it is known that…”, and tended to concern personal details, thoughts, and plans, things that could not truly be known. In essence, whenever the workplace received visits from foreigners, employees were required to report on the atmosphere in the factory and describe how their colleagues reacted to being exposed to people from outside the country.

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Ioana Cîrlig is a Romanian visual artist working with photography, sound, video, and text. She studied Cinematography and began her career as a news photographer in Bucharest, where she worked for five years before turning to independent artistic practice in 2010.

In 2011, she co-founded Post-Industrial Stories with photographer Marin Raica, a long-term project documenting life and transformation in Romania’s post-industrial regions. The project has been widely exhibited internationally, including at the Venice Biennale, Photo London, and major galleries and festivals across Europe, North America, and Asia.

Her work has earned numerous recognitions, such as the Circulations Festival Award, the LensCulture Exposure Award, and the Fotofilmic Award, and has been featured in publications like The Guardian, Der Spiegel, and LensCulture.

Beyond her artistic projects, Ioana has been the photo editor of Scena9 magazine since 2018. She co-founded the Romanian Center for Documentary Photography (CdFD) in 2016, later leaving in 2022 to establish FOC!, an artist collective exploring themes of nature and the environment. Her current long-term project, Accept All Happiness From Me (2017 - ongoing), examines the fragile relationship between humans and nature through poetic reflections on biodiversity, botanical research, and ecological change. Recent highlights include participation in the Reflexions International Photography Masterclass, curating the exhibition FRONT in Bucharest, showing in Ecology of the Afterlife at Anca Poterașu Gallery, and presenting Zâne at the Breda Photo Festival in the Netherlands.

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Artistic interventions are part of the Creative Europe project ''(In)Visible Traces. Artistic memories of the Cold War''.

Funded by the European Union. Views and opinions expressed are however those of the author(s) only and do not necessarily reflect those of the European Union or the European Education and Culture Executive Agency (EACEA). Neither the European Union nor EACEA can be held responsible for them.