What does it mean to carry culture in the body—to move across borders not just physically, but spiritually, emotionally, and sensorially? A Body in Cultural Transit begins with this inquiry and unfolds through the multidimensional practice of Ioana Aron, an artist whose work emerges from migration, memory, and embodied transformation.
This exhibition traces a pivotal moment in the artist’s ongoing project Dans Ma Rue—a transnational exploration that maps presence, belonging, and displacement across urban space. In May 2024, Aron traveled to Cuba, not as a tourist, but as a vessel—open, porous, and primed for rupture. What she encountered was not simply a place, but a mode of being: a visceral confrontation with scarcity, generosity, and resistance. She describes the experience as a spiritual reawakening, one that stripped away the noise of consumption and left her raw with clarity.
Upon returning to Europe, she found herself disoriented by excess. The sensory and emotional residue of Cuba had marked her body once again. Before Cuba, she had lived with the same openness of purpose in the Czech Republic, Germany, Italy, Spain, Mexico, and the United States—each place leaving its own imprint, each encounter layering onto the next. In this state of liminality—between different cultural versions of herself—Dans Ma Rue took shape. She began tracing routes that felt intuitively charged, following emotion more than geography. Each passage through the city became a quiet offering, a ritual of presence. The city responded in kind—through gestures, encounters, textures—and the work became a living archive of these layered exchanges.
At its core, A Body in Cultural Transit asks us to consider the body as both archive and antenna—an active container of cultural transmissions and ancestral knowledge. Aron’s video installation serves as a portal into her embodied journey, inviting viewers not simply to observe, but to feel, to listen, and to move with her. We are asked to step into the sensory logic of migration—to recognize that identity is not fixed, but composed of many returns, ruptures, and reassemblies.
This is not only a story about movement between places, but about the transformations that occur within. It is about the subtle ways our environments, encounters, and lineages shape us. It is about the inheritance of spirit, the politics of presence, and the quiet power of remembering through the body.