Gloria Luca (born 1988 in Iași, Romania) is a Madrid-based multimedia artist whose practice explores urban space as a site of memory, transformation, and symbolic negotiation. In 2023, Gloria was a resident researcher in Connective Tissue, a training program in ‘Artistic Research, Critical Museology, and Cultural Studies’ at the Reina Sofía Museum in Madrid. In 2019, she completed the Critical Images post-master at the Royal Institute of Art in Stockholm. Her work has been exhibited at venues such as Museu de l’Empordà (Spain), The Art Building in Vrå (Denmark), Le Beffroi Cultural Centre (France), and the National Gallery in Prague. She is the author of Dan Perjovschi: The Horizontal Newspaper – A School of Text and Image, published by Curtea Veche and launched in the context of Perjovschi’s participation in Documenta Fifteen, Kassel (2022).
Violence against women in Romanian society is, unfortunately, a harsh reality. The further one moves away from major university centers toward rural Romania, the more visible and frequent this violence becomes — statistics say it, the news confirms it.
My works on this subject arose as direct responses to events that shook the collective conscience, if only briefly.
Patriarchy Has Immunity was born out of anger and helplessness, following the Romanian state’s lamentable failure in the case of Alexandra Măceșanu, a teenager who managed to call 112 several times but was not saved. In a society and legal system deeply rooted in patriarchy, blame is always deflected — anyone can be at fault, as long as we don’t take prevention seriously.
The Invisible Rape critiques the lack of public programmes for the psychological and social support of victims. In a culture where “the woman is to blame,” being a victim means facing a constant risk of retraumatization.
Who speaks for these women when society as a whole silences them? A question I hope will resonate: if “out of sight, out of mind” is the rule, what do we do about the abuse we cannot see? Without the support of society and the state, such abuse does not disappear — it persists, leaving unhealed wounds that may echo across generations, contributing to the constant undermining of women’s condition in Romanian society.
