Maria Mandea
Maria Mandea (b.1991, Bucharest) is an artist-researcher and designer who works with play as an instrument for the critical exploration of space, material culture and heritage. With a background in object design and, before that, in algorithm thinking, she creates objects that contain sets of rules for imagined situations in which players can become immersed. She treats the audience as players and collaborators, building objects and situations that carry their own sets of rules. Her work returns to the same questions: how a group arrives at a shared aesthetic decision, what belongs to whom, and how a post-industrial, post-socialist environment shapes the people who move through it.
Since 2019 her practice has centred on large-scale game-installations. Divided (2020) was made for the Deep Space 8K at the Ars Electronica Center in Linz and presented in the Ars Electronica Festival; Aproape Departe and The System in the Room followed the same year; Jocul Rousseau (2022), a solo exhibition at the National Museum of Contemporary Art in Bucharest, was built around a single sentence from Rousseau's Discourse on Inequality. Her work is held in the public collections of MNAC Bucharest and the Ars Electronica Center. She has exhibited at Maison des Arts Georges & Claude Pompidou in Cajarc, Galeria Gaep and /SAC, and designs for the stage, most recently at Teatrelli and the George Ciprian Theatre in Buzău.
She holds a PhD in Visual Arts from the National University of Arts Bucharest (2022), published in 2024 as Designul Vizual al Jocului. Către o pedagogie a jocului performativ. Her writing on play as a spatial research method has appeared in Temes de Disseny, in Palgrave Studies in Performance and Technology, and in the proceedings of the Design Research Society. She teaches in the Art of Game Design MA at UNATC.
Micul Haos, the puppet practice she began in 2012, ran for over a decade alongside her artistic work rather than inside it. The two converge in The Resilience of the Forgotten Fairy Tale (2026), which she directs: fifteen mediator puppets photographed into the modernist architecture of Romania and France, ending in an album and a participatory exhibition at MNAC Bucharest.
Her practice is collaborative: she co-founded the Super:Serios design collective in 2017, the artist-run space Știrbei47 in 2021 and Institutul Jocului in 2023, and is vice-president of the Laborator Artistic association. She lives and works in Bucharest.
Press
Revista Arta #56-57 - Rousseau tradus prin joc p. 130-133
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