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Iusty Art Gallery is pleased to present Satelit Incantation, the debut solo exhibition in Moldova by Sabina Scorțanu. Featuring video, site-specific installation, and print works, the exhibition explores the intersection of ritual, weather systems, and contemporary myth-making.
In Romanian, the word vremea means both “weather” and “time,” a duality that reveals a deep-rooted connection between atmosphere and temporality. A single phenomenon — a raindrop, a flash of lightning, a sunbeam — exists not only as a fleeting event, but as a marker within a broader continuum, part of a rhythm that unfolds far beyond the limits of individual perception.
Weather, in its essence, is a system in constant flux — a chaotic, dynamic structure. And yet, throughout history, humanity has tried to predict, summon, or resist its forces, translating meteorological mystery into ritual, myth, and science.
In the Carpatho-Danubian-Pontic region — particularly in Moldova and Romania — pre-Christian cosmologies and agrarian rites have long offered frameworks for understanding and influencing nature. Among them is Caloianul, an ancient rain-invoking ritual rooted in agrarian meteorological folklore. The ritual involves burying a clay effigy — a symbolic body — into the earth, accompanied by invocations, chants, and material gestures of hope and magic. These acts reflect an age-old desire to harmonize with the forces of nature through ritualized imagination.
Such gestures, both poetic and practical, speak to a deeper creative impulse — one through which humanity has historically sought not only to interpret the world, but to shape it. Over time, this impulse evolved into technological tools and systems that extended human agency into landscapes, ecosystems, and eventually into the sky itself.
One of the defining instruments of the Anthropocene is the artificial satellite — a technology born from Cold War-era meteorological and military ambitions. With it, humanity pierced the atmosphere, entering the last domain of the biosphere that had once seemed remote, even sacred. The sky, once the realm of gods and cosmogenic imagination, now becomes a grid of data, surveillance, and calculation.
In this context, Satellite Spell examines the shifting relationship between humans and the atmospheric realm — from animistic reverence and magical invocation to instrumental control and environmental disruption. It asks what is lost — and what might still be recovered — as we move from the ritual to the algorithm, from spell to satellite.
The works in the exhibition invite viewers to consider weather not merely as background or condition, but as a living archive of time, belief, and planetary entanglement. They trace a path between the archaic and the contemporary, the intuitive and the technical — suggesting that even in an age of climate systems and remote sensing, our longing to commune with the sky endures
Miercuri – Sâmbătă: 12:00 – 19:00
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