"Dura-Europos" is Iulia Toma's second exhibition project at Ivan Gallery, with a meta-installation of textile collages, photography and video which points out and investigates in a personal way delicate issues for the contemporary geopolitic and social context, among which war, dislocation and alterity. The artist's gestures suggest standpoints and attitudes which seek to generate empathy and nearness in regard to foreign yet present life situations, such as those of refugees and migrants. At the core of the exhibition is the textile installation #orientalswelcome, made of oriental carpets altered through a symbolical process which interrogates these social classes' possibilities, statute and options. The animals and characters defined by the rugs' fabric are cut out and singularised, taken out of context and in the same time freed from their surrounding netting. This point zero of existence has in itself a negative and positive potential likewise, on account of what can happen to a person after his/her containing matrix, his/her environment is removed, after his/her familiar atmosphere is suddenly taken away and the individual gradually stripped of his/her social, cultural and national layers finds him/herself alone in a setting laking any known coordinates, which require personal (re)adjustment and (re)construction.(Diana Ursan)

Ivan Gallery, Bucharest, 2016

(http://www.ivangallery.com/en/exhibition/37/dura-europos)