Ghenadie Popescu: Childhood memories. Siberia 1941– arr.1960

We are very happy to welcome Ghenadie Popescu to Iași for his solo exhibition Childhood memories. Siberia 1941–1960, opening at tranzit ro/ Iași on 2 May 2026.

For more than a decade, Popescu has been gathering testimonies of those deported from Bessarabia (Moldavian Soviet Socialist Republic) to Siberia in the 40’s and 50’s and returned near 1960. This practice has produced a growing archive of interviews, a series of animated films, and a body of built objects used as props. Childhood memories. Siberia 1941– arr.1960 brings three of these components together, shown in this configuration for the first time.

The stop motion documentary animations – a moving image medium that was historically used even before cinema – are central to the project. Four have been completed so far – each one assembled from the voices and remembered details of those deported. The archive holds over one hundred interviews recorded with survivors and their descendants, among them the five testimonies that informed the four animations. Each of the animations was, in turn, built around a different physical model – a constructed movie set fabricated by the artist and animated frame by frame. The one travelling to Iași is a miniature model of a house where the story of the twin sisters Elena and Nina Cazacu unfolds.

The different elements of this project have been seen separately until now. In Iași, the animations are presented alongside the archive of recorded interviews and one of the four miniature models. Bringing them together in one space makes the whole arc legible: a single memory carried from voice to object and moving image.

In an interview in 2019, Ghenadie Popescu has described his choice of the medium as a deliberate match: “I chose to work with sensitive material – people’s memories – and transferred them into another, similarly sensitive medium – animation. We remember animation back from when we were ourselves younger and more fragile. It’s a clumsier, childlike medium.” Each second of film is the result of a slow, manual labour – objects are moved in a coordinated manner resulting in a choreography per frame, 12 frames per second.

The model returns the films to their physical origin: a figure, a hand, a built object. It allows a viewer to understand, materially, what they have been looking at, beyond the testimonies. One can speculate and mark this as yet another testimony of how artistic research expands time and space.

Childhood memories. Siberia 1941–1960 is part of Imagined Organisations: Practices of Artistic Research Moving Across Semiperipheries, a year-long programme by 1+1 and tranzit ro/ Iași (April – 15 November 2026).

Partners of Imagined Organisations: HDK-Valand Academy of Art and Design, University of Gothenburg (SE); and the Centre for Art and Political Imaginaries, CAPIm (SE), Oberliht Association, Chișinău, (MD); Doctoral School Visual Arts Art University, Iași (RO);

Ghenadie Popescu, Childhood memories. Siberia 1941–1960, stills 2026

Co-organised by tranzit.ro/ iași in partnership with 1+1 Association and HDK-Valand Academy of Art and Design, associated initiative of the Centre for Art and the Political Imaginary (CAPIm).

The main partner of tranzit.ro is the ERSTE Foundation.

This is a cultural project co-financed by the Administration of the National Cultural Fund (AFCN). The project does not necessarily represent the position of the Administration of the National Cultural Fund. AFCN is not responsible for the content of the project or for the way the project results can be used. These are entirely the responsibility of the beneficiary of the funding.