Conceived as a polyphonic environment of memory, absence, and unstable narration, The Book of Laughter and Forgetting, curated by Charles Moore, unfolds as a space where personal histories and political inheritances remain in constant negotiation.
Structured as a Romanian-American-Mexican dialogue, the exhibition brings together the works of ten artists: Salvador Jiménez-Flores, Carlos Genova, Dumitru Gorzo, Nicholas Guzman, Erika Harrsch, Aurora Király, Hortensia Mi Kafchin, Vlad Nancă, Șerban Savu, and Mihai Zgondoiu. Across these distinct practices, a shared terrain emerges—one shaped by migration, translation, and the layered experience of belonging across geographies.
Drawing from Milan Kundera’s eponymous novel, the exhibition resists linear storytelling, instead proposing a fragmented constellation of images, gestures, and temporalities. Memory appears not as a site of preservation, but as a volatile structure—subject to erosion, distortion, and reassembly—while forgetting emerges as both rupture and generative condition.
Within this shifting terrain, the works navigate the porous boundaries between intimacy and collective history, where displacement, ideology, and the instability of archives inscribe themselves onto bodies, materials, and space. The domestic and the political collapse into one another, revealing how remembrance is always entangled with structures of visibility and power. Threaded through these tensions is a quiet insistence on ambiguity, irony, and tonal dissonance. Here, laughter does not resolve contradiction but sustains it—opening a space in which fragility, tenderness, and estrangement coexist.
Presented at the Romanian Cultural Institute New York, the exhibition becomes less a statement than an atmosphere—an invitation to inhabit uncertainty and to consider how what is remembered and what is allowed to fade continuously reconfigure the present.
Exhibition Dates: May 21 – June 19, 2026
Opening Reception: May 21, 2026, 6–9 PM
Artist Presentations at 7 PM
