The avant-garde created a rupture from traditional forms of art, while the Playboy culture of the 1960s significantly influenced representations of the body. Alongside feminist discourse, which uses the body to critique the loss of identity with cultural, political, and social implications, sexual liberation also introduced the image of the consuming woman — in contradiction with feminist principles, yet aligned with post-feminist directions.
For a young artist in contemporary Romania, the assumption of an explicit approach to biological exhibition constitutes a courageous act, largely absent from the local art scene, particularly in art practiced by women, precisely because it confronts forms of censorship. The untrained viewer often reacts in a harsh and crude manner to the body stripped of its clothing conventions. As a result, such artistic expressions continue to provoke negative reactions in the local context, due to a lack of visual education.
Cristina Garabetanu’s black-and-white photographs have the power to communicate trauma — a process of alienation experienced by a woman trapped within her own body. It is no coincidence that the young artist employs a self-referential discourse. This investigation of identity involves the woman as body, as biological presence, in the sense articulated by Judith Butler, building on Michel Foucault’s theories, where the body is understood as a performative element that plays a role, a surface inscribed and shaped by practices of power.
Cristina Garabetanu’s photographs are not comfortable. They exist at the threshold between direct expression and the constructed act of assuming a role, examining the effects of personal schizoidity.
The dichotomies of sexual politics of the gaze (passive/active, subject/object, etc.) no longer serve an idealistic vision of the body, but instead enter a much deeper cultural sphere within a realist-contemporary philosophy. The woman is no longer an embodiment of beauty, a passive element to be contemplated. She is her own subject. She is a human being, with a biological and psychological identity brought into question by Cristina Garabetanu in relation to social norms, the prejudices of contemporary society, and the public and private spaces that function as sites of constraint and alienation. “Know yourself” remains one of humanity’s most difficult challenges.
Cristina Garabetanu’s works contain her, while at the same time expressing the obstacles that stand in her own way.

(text by Olivia Nițiș)