In Bucharest Is a Crumbly Cookie, Ioana Mincu approaches the city through its material vulnerability: cracked façades, exposed brick and bundles of cables, improvised repairs, waste; animals, insects and weeds taking over the spaces in between. The city appears as a porous body, continually penetrated and transformed by the human and non-human lives it holds.

A city of visible interventions. Buildings carry successive architectural and political histories alongside contemporary additions; surfaces are perforated and adapted without fully concealing what came before. Mincu takes this condition of patching as both a material reality and a way of thinking about the work. In the new ceramic and watercolor works, a cracked dumpster stitched together with wire becomes an image of its particular logic: the damage remains visible, while an improvised gesture keeps the object in use–care and injury coexist.

This proximity permeates the exhibition. Mincu describes it through the idea of tender violence. Slightly raised on rough building bricks, her dog, Franj, gives birth to a litter of five. In reality she is sterilized, because the vet said, “it’s better this way.” The birth image offers an impossible future. Human intervention—to achieve what we believe to be right—assumes the authority to supersede another being’s biological course: to “repair” something while unsure whether it is broken, altering it and determining what form its destiny will take.

A quiet unmaking.

An abandoned building is not empty. Its new occupants embrace the opportunities offered by its rot, roots split masonry making room for new growth, water eats slowly at metal until it rusts into something else entirely. Through whimsical, hand-painted motifs on clay and paper, Mincu conjures a vision of the sublime and fragile world she encounters on her daily journey from home to studio. Roosting pigeons and wandering strays settle into forgotten human spaces.

In the middle of the darkened gallery space stands a ceramic air-conditioning unit. Our need to adapt to a rapidly changing climate has led to a lack of regulation surrounding the exterior placement of these units, allowing them to invade the cityscape, clinging like ticks to historic façades. Removed from the building and placed in the gallery, the air-conditioning unit remains an awkward presence: as visually intrusive here as it is on the city’s architecture. The idea of patching reemerges.

In Mincu’s dark fairy tale world of accumulated decay, it is the insects, snails, worms, and parasites who take on the role of protagonist. They are our agents of metamorphosis.