Official press coverage and video archives for Roxana Donaldson’s solo show exhibition Trace Evidence Protocol Exhibition in Timișoara, at Galeria Brăteanu, 2026.
The whole research archive can be navigated through the links in the page footer.
Curatorial Text
Reviews
- Propagarta
- Modernism.ro
- Andreea Busuioc – noduri + semne | mark recording protocol – solo show Roxana Donaldson at Galeria Brăteanu, Timisoara
ROXANA DONALDSON |mark recording protocol | threads + traces |
Timișoara, May 2026 –
Visual artist Roxana Donaldson presents the evolving installation threads + traces at Brăteanu Gallery in Timișoara, opening May 6, 2026. The installation delineates a perimeter inhabited by painting extended three-dimensionally through the object—an alternative terrain infused with clinical, contemplative melancholy, where conceptual art is engaged through process-based discipline and an uncompromising post-minimalist ethos.
Curated by Costin Brăteanu, threads + traces configures a new phase of the structure first presented at Galeria 9 in Brașov in November 2025. It positions the inventory as a form of resistance against disappearance and forgetting, while putting forward vital questions: Is classification anything more than a sophisticated attempt to counteract entropy? Where does the past truly begin and end? How do we preserve the traces of anonymous lives?
The investigation turns on archiving the private domestic lives of anonymous women, whose historical presence was reduced by administrative registers to three sterile coordinates: birth (naming), marriage (transfer), and death (integration into an anonymous continuum). Across these markers lies an aching void—an absence Roxana Donaldson transmutes into physical matter, exposing the mechanisms of systemic control that instrumentalize erasure.
In an act that symbolically recovers what institutional power deleted through omission, the artist uses reclaimed wood, pigment powder, twine, enamel, and repurposed domestic bedsheet canvas. Serial 12 × 12 cm wooden modules appear throughout the space, entering into dialogue with the fluid, unstretched paintings. These archival enclosures, assembled from timber and cord, function as “self-imposed physical limits”—sampling devices and filters for memory, serving as the elemental units of measurement for feminine absence.
Based in Bucharest, Roxana Donaldson is a painter and memory analyst whose practice operates at the intersection of conceptualism, process art, and post-minimalism. Her work remains obsessively anchored in the analog, interrogating the architecture of remembrance through painting and tactile assemblages that entrap fragile, volatile emotional realities. She prioritizes domestic, recovered textiles, methodically layering them with raw pigments and inscribed registers that archive the passage of time.
Viewers are invited to confront their own responses to the “trace” by attending the opening reception on May 6 at 18:30, or by viewing the installation at Brăteanu Gallery in Timișoara between May 6 and May 19, 2026.
