Liliana Basarab

Liliana Basarab is a visual artist who lives and works in Bucharest. Her artistic practice has astrong social dimension and manifests through various media, such as ceramics, textiles,drawing, performance, participatory workshops, and video.

Her artistic practice has astrong social dimension and manifests through various media, such as ceramics, textiles,drawing, performance, participatory workshops, and video.

She is involved and complicit in various forms of artisticorganisation, from the Vector Association in Iași in the 2000s to the Sofia Nădejde AwardsCollective (2018-2022) and currently the Malmaison Studios

During her residency at the MQ, Liliana Basarab proposes an ecofeminist reimagining of Vienna’s mythological heritage. By revisiting and subtly detouring existing artworks, she exposes the patriarchal structures embedded in their narratives, reclaiming them as spaces of ecological and feminist potential.

This approach continues her long-standing engagement with mythology, now situated within the urgency of contemporary ecological concerns, asking how ancient stories might be retold to imagine more just and sustainable futures.

Reinterpreting figures such as Artemis, Demeter, and Gaia, she explores their transformation into agents of resistance and care, rather than passive symbols of fertility or feared “others.”

In Vienna—where Art Nouveau often entwined the female body with floral ornament—this rereading shifts nature from decoration to an active, relational force that unsettles the patriarchal gaze.