If you could live with just one work of art, what would it be?
Brancusi’s studio in the 1920s, a space not just for sculpture but for communion: here Erik Satie playing a few anarchic notes on a small harmonium, there Lizica Codreanu floating in a long sculptural dress performing an improvised dance around Bird in Space or Endless Column, Tristan Tzara shouting cut-up poetry and Duchamp quietly observing with a sly smile. I cannot think of an artwork without its reception, the experiences it generates.
Which cultural experience changed the way you see the world?
My sensibility was forged in the wings of Teatrul Giulesti in Bucharest, where my mother was an actress, and the theatre a second home. So, I’d say Robert Wilson’s collaboration with Philip Glass for Einstein on the Beach (1976), a hypnotic, durational ritual that redefined what opera—and performance itself—could be.
Which writer do you return to most?
Most recently Ocean Vuong. I love his vulnerability, the tenderness and toughness of his writings, the way he conveys the experience of immigration as embodied, linked with fragmented memory.
What are you listening to?
Progressive rock, such as Pink Floyd. I also love any compilation of acid jazz, and fusion-style music, especially Afro-Caribbean.
What are you watching or following that you would recommend?
Steve McQueen’s Small Axe anthology series for BBC/Amazon (2020), a bold reminder of how film can reshape history. Chantal Akerman’s films, which have redefined how women’s lives, labour and interiority could be portrayed on screen. A retrospective of more than 40 of her features and rarely screened short films opens at MoMA in September.
What is art for?
It is a form of inquiry into what it means to be human. Art disrupts certainty, invites reflection, transforms perception, opens new ways of understanding, and acts as a conduit for both personal and collective consciousness.
• Roxana Marcoci is co-curator of New Photography 2025: Lines of Belonging, Museum of Modern Art, New York, 14 September-17 January 2026
