::: Visual arts after the 90’s.  Iuliana Varodi and Morisena
by Ioana Vlasiu, art historian (november 2007) 

Targu-Mures- born Iuliana Varodi is back (...) with a certain kind of social activism and the belief that the connections between people that share passions and interests can create a better framework for everyday life. From her travels through India, she returned with many photopraphs and especially memories and experiences of another human temperature that constituted the starting point and the substance for several exhibitions of photography at Targu-Mures and at The Art Museum in Cluj – as well as for a volume of poetry in Romanian. During Fata Morgana, the exhibition in Cluj, Iuliana Varodi shared a compressed diary of her encounter with India. She took part with photos in the itinerant exhibition “24 hours at home in Europe”, which was presented in a couple of European countries.
With stubbornness and energy, with an enthusiasm rarely seen in our country, she founded at Sangeorgiu de Mures in a very short time a centre for artistic projects and cultural exchanges called „Morisena”, which already started to function this summer. (...) Travelling is an art, we used to say. Nowadays, art is travelling, at least since Andrei Cadere’s wanderings in the nineteen 70-ies. While Andrei Cadere’s project was individual, today’s projects have a programatic comunitary dimension. Contemporary nomadism doesn’t have the exotic in its seeking expectations, although this may not be totally absent in the case of a westerner who has come to Transylvania. The spirit of improvisation and spontaneity, which does not mean lack of coherence, a keen observation and the capacity to generate meaning are stongly present in the video produced by the participants. The ten young artists (participants at 'Hitchhiking to Transylvania' the first project at morisena) have crossed a great part of Europe and Romania in order to meet each other in Sangeorgiu de Mures, to spend some time together in an unknown place, everyone bringing with themselves their story and the experience of the journey, their own personal view on otherness, tender or harsher, narrated on a lyrical or ironical, funny or dramatic tone, in a laconic or descriptive manner.

::: Rite in the vibrant rhythm of India
by Cora Fodor, art historian (october 2006)

It is what many have tried to discover in this mysterious territory of ancestral secrets. The temptation has also carried Iuliana Varodi on a ’initiation’ journey in a world in which the Eternal seems to be welcoming people at each step, living experiences that she reveals through a double act: the debut poetry book „Versuri in Zbor – Lacrimi pulbere de soare” and the exhibition of photography “Rite. Rhythm. India”, her third on India.
A series of nineteen images that represent a fragment of the amazing experiences the artist had during the one year spent in India. The immortalisation of India through her people, street images and its particularities was the impulse of returning to the origins, to a love of the near ones. We see a mix of the sacred and prosaic in a world of contrasts. Using a simple but not simplistic language, the author flows between the rational and the emotional, using the detail in an attempt to recreate the whole. While at a first glance the message appears to be easily read, the images gradually transpose us in a feeling of renunciation, of an effort of intimate fulfilment, of love. (...) scenes that create a general atmosphere beyond time, an image of a world in which time expands and flows according to different rules.
With the accent laid on detail, its message comes back as a leit-motive (...) all scenes apparently without a connection. Still, they represent the experience of an introspective journey within the immediate surroundings and within ones own being (...). The artist has shared the fruits, the knowledge and experiences that she lived in India, that gave a profound sense and meaning to her journey. What incites in her work is not the representation, but the fact that as you look at these images, one feels triggered to go behind the immediate materiality of things, in other dimensions than the ones that surround us. 

::: Many thanks to all those who have supported my work in some way or another - through their advice, reviews, helping hands, carrying hearts. Special thanks and smiles for Anil Vidyalankar, Stefan Witte, Tom Reger, Mihai Stoica,
Marie, Professor R. C. Shukla, Cristi Georgescu, Laura Munteanu, Wim et Manue, Madhusudan Baul,
Mataji in Tapovan, Come Carpentier, Anthony, Akeel, Charlee in Bangkok, Jan Roters, Sher,
Fleur, Aukje, Nicholas, Claire, Raymond, Lucy & Guss, Eugeniu Nistor, Shingo,
Laura, Marja, Maria Rus Bojan, Ioana Vlasiu, Dorota, Brice,
Alexandra Rus, Anne,