WANT

WANT

Artists: Michele Bressan, Anca Enache, Dani Ghercă, Daniela & Ioana Groza Pop, Hortensia Mi Kafchin, Iosif Király, Virginia Lupu, Lea Rasovszky, Roman Tolici

Salon de Papier, 12 Constantin Cristescu Street, Bucharest

Opening: Friday, 29 May, 7 pm

Exhibition on view: 29 May – 27 July 2026

In 1973, journalist and writer Nancy Friday initiated the editorial project My Secret Garden — one of the most controversial books of its era, dismissed by some as pornography, received by others as a revelation, and transformed over time into a foundational work in feminist literature on sexuality.

Half a century later, actress and activist Gillian Anderson picks up the thread opened by Nancy Friday in the volume WANT, a book that carries the conversation further into a world which, despite appearances of greater freedom, continues to impose silences and to shame female pleasure, gathering the confessions of women from around the world about what it means to be a woman and to desire, with all the complexity, vulnerability, and force that this entails.

The publication of Want in Romania coincides with a critical moment in Romanian society, marked by a resurgence of misogynistic discourse, the toxic visibility of figures such as the Tate brothers, growing aggression against women in public and digital spaces, and recent scandals involving the non-consensual distribution of intimate images. In this climate, in which women's bodies are once again reduced to objects of others' desire and their voices are routinely ridiculed, invalidated, or censored, the need to create a space where women's fantasies, desires, and pleasures can be spoken without shame and, above all, without fear becomes all the more urgent.

WANT is a group exhibition that opens a space of expression and reflection on female desire, not as a marginal or taboo subject, but as a living centre of women's subjective, political, and sensory experience. Inspired by the volume Want, edited by Gillian Anderson, the exhibition explores feminine erotic fantasy as a form of knowledge, survival, and reclamation of one's own voice.

The works brought together in the exhibition open symbolic "rooms" of pleasure and fantasy, inviting the public to enter not merely as witnesses, but as sensitive participants in a deeply human conversation.