10 Questions with Carmen Vornicelu
Carmen Vornicelu is a Romanian artist working across visual systems, text, sound, spatial situations, and participatory formats. Active since the early 2000s, she constructs mechanisms through which perception, context, and cultural criteria can be read, activated, and repositioned.
Her current research framework, Pre-Economic Architecture, investigates the conditions that precede the formation of economic, institutional, or political value. This framework positions artistic practice as a way of examining how visibility, recognition, repetition, and criteria shape what can become relevant, transmissible, and real.
Working from Romania’s post-communist context, Vornicelu does not approach history as closed memory, but as an active field in which freedom, perception, authority, and recognition continue to be negotiated. Her work does not reproduce inherited structures; it constructs contemporary mechanisms through which they can be exposed, interrupted, and recalibrated.
Carmen Vornicelu - Portrait
ARTIST STATEMENT
Perception organizes the world. Before something acquires economic relevance, institutional legitimacy, or political visibility, it has already been organized perceptually. What appears. What remains outside visibility. What can be named. What can be repeated. What becomes criterion. What, over time, comes to be recognized as value. At this threshold, culture functions as perceptual infrastructure. It organizes attention, stabilizes criteria, and determines what can enter circulation. Repetition stabilizes perception. Stabilized perception becomes criterion. Criteria generate circulation. Circulation stabilizes value. Economic systems do not begin with production alone. They begin with recognition. Recognition does not begin with exchange. It begins with perception. Cultural infrastructure precedes economic infrastructure. Not as metaphor. As mechanism. Pre-Economic Architecture names this field of intervention: the level at which culture organizes the conditions through which something can become visible, legitimate, transmissible, and real. Carmen Vornicelu’s practice operates within this pre-economic field. The medium is not the decisive point; the operation is. Image, text, sound, installation, protocol, or public situation become relevant insofar as they modify a field of perception, interrupt a criterion, or produce another form of recognition. Perception is the first political space. The intervention takes place before capture.
The Yellow Riding Crop, Conceptual artwork, modular structure 10 + 1, Digital / text-based / sign-based visual system, Variable dimensions, 2025 © Carmen Vornicelu
The Yellow Riding Crop is a conceptual mechanism that examines the moment when repetition stabilizes a falsified criterion and error becomes norm.
The work is built on a numerical and sign-based architecture — 0, 10, 1, ≠, 96, “”, ( ), 99, 6, *****, ↺ — in which repetition operates as a procedure of exposure, transfer and activation. The modular structure 10 + 1 is not a formal composition, but an operative architecture: ten visual fields and a final relation through which the mechanism becomes active.
Each field activates a self-referential sign regime, supported by a footnote mechanism organized through five functions: Concept, Code, Falsification, Mechanism, Consecration. The footnotes do not simply explain the work; they transform the criterion. They introduce the term, codify it, falsify it, make it operative and consecrate it as norm.
Within this structure, authority is not maintained only through command alone, but through the repetition and consecration of deviation. When error is reiterated, ordered, annotated and absorbed as rule, it produces a cultural architecture that continues to function even after the meaning that supported it can no longer be stabilized.
As a conceptual riding crop, the work does not punish or correct. It marks the point where culture breaks away from its own mechanisms of authority and continues to operate through inherited criteria, reflexes of alienation and forms of validation sustained by repetition.
Post-communism appears here not as memory, but as a residual infrastructure of recognition: a field in which old forms of cultural alienation continue to distribute visibility after the political framework that produced them disappears.
Within Carmen Vornicelu’s broader research framework, Pre-Economic Architecture, perception is the first political space: the place where it is decided what can be seen, recognized, repeated and sustained as real. The false does not enter the system. It organizes it.
INTERVIEW
You have been active as an artist since the early 2000s. Could you tell us about your background, your studies, and how you first became interested in making art?
I am Romanian, so I grew up in a culture where reality and its official version often coexisted as two parallel systems. From an early age, the gap between them shaped my attention to what appears, what is declared, and what actually operates. From the beginning, art was the place where observation could become a position, and intuition could be followed through to its consequences. I was drawn to its freedom to reconfigure what passed for self-evident. I began exhibiting in the early 2000s, while I was studying painting at the Academy of Arts in Bucharest. The five years I spent there transformed observation into a working tool and taught me to understand the image not simply as the result of representation, but as a form through which thought is articulated. Over time, the centre of my practice shifted away from studio production and toward research into the mechanisms that organise how artistic forms appear, are interpreted, and circulate within the cultural field.
Your practice explores how perception shapes what becomes visible, valuable, or recognized. When did you first become interested in the relationship between perception and value?
My interest remained implicit for a long time. It became explicit when I understood that a culture can recognize only what its perceptual infrastructure first allows it to see. From that moment on, perception was no longer, for me, a stage of reception, but the site where reality is already selected and organized within a field of relations. Value does not precede this structure; it is constituted within it. This is where my research is situated: in the interval before evaluation, where visibility is organized and the conditions of value begin to take shape.
The Yellow Riding Crop, Conceptual artwork, modular structure 10 + 1, Digital / text-based / sign-based visual system, Variable dimensions, 2025 © Carmen Vornicelu
You describe your current research framework as Pre-Economic Architecture. Could you explain this concept and what led you to investigate the conditions that exist before economic, institutional, or political value is formed?
Value begins before exchange. Institutions arrive late in the process. By the time they evaluate, legitimize, or distribute authority, culture has already organized what can enter the field of attention, be articulated within a shared language, and become a point of reference.
Pre-Economic Architecture is the framework through which I investigate the perceptual level at which the conditions of value are formed, before value is formalized economically, institutionally, or politically. “Pre-economic” indicates a structural rather than chronological priority. The economy, institutions, and politics depend on an already active perceptual field in which certain things become recognizable and relevant.
Value enters formal systems only after a series of operations has already taken place. Attention has been directed, certain things have become visible, and repetition has stabilized their presence. Through validation and circulation, this stability can begin to function as a criterion or reinforce criteria that are already active. At that point, the criterion no longer merely describes the field; it begins to organize it.
What remains outside the field of perception does not occupy an inferior position; it never reaches the position from which it can matter. Pre-Economic Architecture emerged from observing situations in which recognition preceded evaluation, and value began to operate before its own criteria had been examined. Culture appears here as infrastructure: it participates in organizing the conditions through which something becomes recognizable, can function as a criterion, and can acquire value. Value is formed before it is formalized. This is the territory of Pre-Economic Architecture.
Your work moves between text, sound, visual systems, spatial situations, and participatory formats. How do you choose the medium or format that best communicates each idea?
Format is the first consequence of the idea. I choose it according to the operation the work needs to perform: to establish an argument, introduce a duration, reorganize a space, call for a decision, or make a system perceptible. The medium does not carry the idea; it configures how the idea operates. Text, sound, space, or participation alter the mode in which the idea is encountered and, implicitly, what it can produce. Choosing the form means choosing the conditions under which the work can function. Form is the moment when thought becomes operative.
The Yellow Riding Crop, Conceptual artwork, modular structure 10 + 1, Digital / text-based / sign-based visual system, Variable dimensions, 2025 © Carmen Vornicelu
The Yellow Riding Crop, Conceptual artwork, modular structure 10 + 1, Digital / text-based / sign-based visual system, Variable dimensions, 2025 © Carmen Vornicelu
The Yellow Riding Crop, Conceptual artwork, modular structure 10 + 1, Digital / text-based / sign-based visual system, Variable dimensions, 2025 © Carmen Vornicelu
The Yellow Riding Crop, Conceptual artwork, modular structure 10 + 1, Digital / text-based / sign-based visual system, Variable dimensions, 2025 © Carmen Vornicelu
Working from a Romanian post-communist context, how has this historical and social background influenced the questions you explore through your practice?
I am from Romania, which already means that I have a very particular relationship with freedom, authority, survival, improvisation, and dramatic cultural transitions. Post-communist reality is not merely a political consequence, but an active perceptual condition. The formal end of the dictatorship did not dismantle the reflexes through which authority continues to be recognized, repeated, and validated as order. This is the risk: a society can appear free while unconsciously reproducing the reflexes of domination. It can believe that it is choosing freely while responding to inherited signs of command, manufactured patriotism, superficial belonging, and false authority. This context has oriented my practice toward a central question: under what conditions does choice cease to be autonomous and become a response to an inherited perceptual code?
This is the source of my interest in how freedom can be hollowed out from within when recognition precedes judgment and falsified criteria become cultural norms. The most dangerous form of domination is the one that no longer needs to issue orders, because perception has already learned to obey. The rupture is political. The continuity is perceptual.
You often examine systems of recognition, repetition, and authority. What interests you about the way certain ideas, structures, or values become accepted as normal?
For me, normality is neither a rule nor the point at which something has been accepted. It is the amplitude of a cultural field: the extent to which that field can sustain difference without translating it into deviation or rupture. A sufficiently developed field can contain tensions, incompatible positions, and new forms without either neutralizing them or itself falling apart. I am therefore less interested in producing agreement than in a culture’s capacity to keep difference active. Repetition, recognition, and authority become decisive precisely here: they can expand the boundaries of normality to include difference, or fix difference outside them.
In The Yellow Riding Crop, you explore how repetition can transform an error or deviation into an established norm. What inspired this investigation?
The investigation began with a specific cultural situation in which recognition had preceded examination, while the familiarity of the discourse was already functioning as authority. I became interested in the moment when inherited authority no longer needs to assert or justify itself in order to operate: it is enough for it to be recognizable, to recur, and to be treated as a point of reference. The Yellow Riding Crop is conceived as a research device structured along three axes: recalibration, transfer of status, and visual recurrence. The work is positioned within the field of artistic research into obedience, aestheticized power, and perceptual conditioning, where authority no longer operates through command, but through its capacity to establish itself as self-evident. The final recalibration shifts the work from exposing a perceptual order toward the possibility of reconfiguring, from within, the infrastructure that produces criteria, authority, and value. What matters is not the error, but the architecture that allows it to become a criterion.
The Yellow Riding Crop, Conceptual artwork, modular structure 10 + 1, Digital / text-based / sign-based visual system, Variable dimensions, 2025 © Carmen Vornicelu
Many of your works function as mechanisms or systems rather than traditional art objects. What interests you about creating structures that viewers can enter, interpret, or question?
I am interested in the moment when a work ceases to describe a mechanism and begins to operate through it. An object can represent a system. An active structure can make its rules, tensions, and effects visible at the very moment the system is operating. The person entering the work is neither merely a spectator nor the material of an experiment; they become one of the conditions through which the mechanism manifests itself. I do not build these systems to produce a predetermined response, but to create situations in which positions, choices, and their consequences can become observable. Interpretation is not added to the work afterwards. It participates in its operation. The work does not present the system. It creates the conditions for its manifestation.
You describe perception as “the first political space.” How do you see art as a tool for reshaping the ways we understand reality and the systems around us?
Perception is the first political space. Every system depends on a particular way of making the world visible and intelligible. I am not interested in art as a representation of systems, but as an intervention into the conditions under which they become legible. When a work alters what can be seen, named, or recognized, it changes the position from which reality can be judged and choices can be formulated. Art does not replace one version of reality with another. It changes the perceptual framework within which reality and the systems around us become intelligible.
Looking ahead, what new questions, materials, or forms of research would you like to explore within your practice?
The next stage of my practice is the move from exposing perceptual infrastructures to constructing and testing infrastructures of recognition. I am interested in whether value can remain active before being fixed as status, hierarchy, or authority; whether recognition can operate without translating difference into score or consensus; and whether a system can sustain conflict without fragmenting. These questions are leading me toward protocols, interfaces, dynamic registers, simulations, and public situations in which processes of recognition, contestation, and recalibration can be observed in real time. Value becomes operative before it becomes convertible.
Artist’s Talk
Al-Tiba9 Interviews is a curated promotional platform that offers artists the opportunity to articulate their vision and engage with our diverse international readership through insightful, published dialogues. Conducted by Mohamed Benhadj, founder and curator of Al-Tiba9, these interviews spotlight the artists’ creative journeys and introduce their work to the global contemporary art scene.
Through our extensive network of museums, galleries, art professionals, collectors, and art enthusiasts worldwide, Al-Tiba9 Interviews provides a meaningful stage for artists to expand their reach and strengthen their presence in the international art discourse.
Carmen Vornicelu is a Romanian artist working across visual systems, text, sound, spatial situations, and participatory formats. Her current research framework, Pre-Economic Architecture, investigates the conditions that precede the formation of economic, institutional, or political value, examining the criteria that shape what can become relevant.