Black Milk - by Iulia Ferenc, 2025
I curate exhibitions that explore the raw, unfiltered layers of human experience, bringing together practices that challenge comfort and question deeply embedded perceptions. I am interested in creating spaces where intimacy, vulnerability, and confrontation coexist, inviting viewers into an honest and often unsettling dialogue with themselves.
”Iulia Ferenc (@iulia_ferenc) is an artist currently studying Graphics at the National University of Arts in Bucharest. Her practice is primarily centered around drawing, while also extending into installation, painting, photography, and animation. Her visual language is predominantly monochromatic—black and white—rooted in the traditional realm of graphic arts.
The themes she explores revolve around spirituality and the connection between humans and the universe, while also investigating the human mind through introspection in a raw and uncompromising manner. Her work challenges the status quo and questions traditional social and cultural values. By confronting deeply personal and existential themes, she invites the viewer into a dialogue about identity, consciousness, and the world around us.
Within the exhibition “Black Milk”, a fragment of an ongoing body of work is presented, through which the artist constructs a visual metaphor reflecting on the idea of human intimacy. The compositions depict nature—where reproduction exists as pure instinct. These unsettling images compel us to confront the raw and transactional aspects of physical closeness, addressing our own fears surrounding intimacy. They provoke reflection on the fragile balance between physical desire and the human need for connection, as, for humans, bodily encounters often carry a longing for intimacy, vulnerability, and trust.
The exhibition’s title itself holds multiple layers of meaning. It pays tribute to the artist’s musical influences while also referencing the complementary visual juxtaposition of black and white. It recalls the context in which milk is most often used—as a symbol of motherhood—deeply intimate, emotionally charged, and innocent, meant to create profound bonds between mother and child, nourishing both body and spirit. Yet, in certain cultural contexts and cinematic imagery, it has also been associated with sensuality and desire. Black, in contrast, suggests the defilement and sensual corruption of this “milk,” evoking animalistic, irrational, and instinctual dimensions—devoid of depth or reduced to purely reproductive function—thereby challenging its deeper symbolic meanings.
The juxtaposition of these two terms evokes oppositions such as Lilith and Eve, or the Black Swan and the White Swan, emphasizing the tension between the unconscious and the conscious, between instinct and emotion, as an expression of profound human duality.”
Andreea-Eliza Petrov