Art Encounters Biennial 2025. Theme and Artist List of 6th Edition announced!

© Art Encounters Foundation 2025.

Bounding Histories. Whispering Tales
📍 Timișoara, Romania
🗓️ May 30 – July 13, 2025
Curated by Ana Janevski and Tevž Logar
🔗 artencounters.ro

The Art Encounters Foundation is pleased to announce the sixth edition of the Art Encounters Biennial, taking place from May 30 to July 13, 2025, in Timișoara, Romania. Titled Bounding Histories. Whispering Tales., this edition is curated by Ana Janevski and Tevž Logar, and unfolds across three key exhibition sites—each with a distinct historical and architectural resonance: the Garrison Command (a former military facility), FABER (a repurposed industrial site), and the Art Encounters Foundation (a former kindergarten).

Rooted in a deep engagement with the city’s urban and historical textures, the curatorial concept takes the echo as both metaphor and method. Described by the curators as a “signal of relation rather than direct transmission,” the echo serves as a guiding principle for articulating the dialogue between artworks, spaces, and audiences—insisting on reverberation over repetition, and on resonance as a space of transformation.

This edition brings together more than 60 international and Romanian artists, among them Lawrence Abu Hamdan, Marina Abramović & Ulay, Joan Jonas, Hassan Khan, Teresa Margolles, Cecilia Vicuña, Jumana Manna, Oscar Murillo, Petrit Halilaj, Simone Forti, and Geta Brătescu, alongside a strong presence of artists from Central and Eastern Europe and the Global South. Notably, the Biennial includes five new commissions that engage directly with the layered histories of Timișoara’s exhibition venues.

As a conceptual framework, Bounding Histories. Whispering Tales. maps out a terrain of entanglements: between memory and displacement, between labor and care, between acts of witnessing and the longing for repair. The artworks resonate across historical events and present-day urgencies, proposing new forms of solidarity and storytelling within a fractured world.

The public program will feature a dynamic constellation of performances, screenings, workshops, and talks—inviting audiences not only to visit the Biennial, but to inhabit it, moving through the city as part of an “evolving choreography of echoes.”

The Art Encounters Biennial 2025 is supported by non-reimbursable funding through the Ministry of Culture’s priority cultural programme, and by the Administration of the National Cultural Fund (AFCN). The views expressed within the Biennial are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the positions of these institutions.