SHAKESPEARE'S RESIDENTS 2026

In partnership with the 2026 International Shakespeare Festival, GLORIÆ Gallery presented a group exhibition featuring works created during the inaugural Shakespeare Visual artist residency. Curated by Gloria Berceanu and Valentin Boiangiu, the exhibition opened on Saturday, 23 May 2026, at 6:00 p.m., in the presence of the participating artists.

From 98 proposals submitted through the international open call, seven artists from Romania and abroad were selected: Lena Ciobanu (Romania), Danielle Rosa (Brazil), STOL Collective – Anio Ciutac, Mara Verhoogt, and Marco Verhoogt (Romania–Netherlands), Sevan Székely (Romania), and Mircea Cîrtog (Romania). During the residency taking place in Craiova from 15 to 22 May, the artists have developed new works through a creative process directly inspired by Shakespeare's universe, while also engaging with the city and its local community.

The central theme of this year's edition, WILL matters, is inspired by Prospero's closing speech in The Tempest ("We are such stuff as dreams are made on"). Through the exhibition, the artists explore how Shakespeare's work continues to generate new visual languages and fresh questions about identity, memory, technology, the body, and imagination. The exhibition will remain open to the public until 1 June 2026.

> "For the first edition of the Shakespeare Visual residency, the key concepts that guided our selection were adaptation, diversity, and invention. We sought projects capable of reshaping the audience's perception while reflecting the gallery's contemporary identity, with a strong emphasis on experimentation and innovation. We are confident in our selection and believe that, together with the participating international artists, our efforts will result in an exceptionally compelling exhibition," say curators Gloria Berceanu and Valentin Boiangiu.

The initiative reflects GLORIÆ Art Gallery's mission to promote contemporary art and support local and national artists. At the same time, the project advances the gallery's objective of diversifying its exhibition programme and expanding its international reach, contributing to Craiova's growing presence on the international cultural map.

During the residency, Lena Ciobanu is developing The Pavilion of Dreams, an immersive installation that transforms the gallery pavilion into an organism suspended between reality and fantasy, materialising the inner architecture of dreams within physical space.

With Tempestuous, Danielle Rosa maps the city through a photographic research project based on performative self-portraits. By superimposing the female archetypes of The Tempest—Miranda, Sycorax, and Claribel—onto Craiova's urban landscape, she explores the relationship between the female body and public space.

STOL Collective presents a mixed-media installation exploring our contemporary relationship with Shakespeare and, more broadly, with the notions of theatricality, the stage, and life as performance. Combining photography, sculpture, and drawing, the collective constructs a map of Shakespearean impressions crystallised within the collective imagination.

Sevan Székely approaches Prospero's speech through a political reading of power and illusion, creating a site-specific installation that combines large-scale painting, sound, and light to question how contemporary reality is controlled, directed, and colonised through images.

Mircea Cîrtog presents The Breath Between Us, an interactive audio-visual installation that uses a living plant as a biological interface between the viewer and Shakespeare's text. The work translates visitors' proximity and breathing into a generative soundscape composed of Shakespearean verses, dissolving the boundaries between nature, technology, and language.