Imaginary Biographical Dialogues and Bifurcated Narratives
by Emanuela I. Harris Sintamarian
Tendergold Gallery, International Art Museum of America
On display: April 25th – May 25th, 2025
Reception: May 10th from 3 – 6 PM
About Imaginary Biographical Dialogues and Bifurcated Narratives:
Sometimes, much of contemporary life is wrapped in the poetry of melancholy, loneliness, and absurdity. My work does not aim to document reality but to distort, subvert, and reimagine it—echoing my impulses, desires, and thoughts while amplifying these inherent contradictions. As an artist I am interested in choices: what remains to be seen, what is absent and how decisions are made.
Imaginary Biographical Dialogues and Bifurcated Narratives is an ongoing series shaped by my recent trip to Romania, my birth country, where I experienced the unsettling dissonance between past and present, a feeling many immigrants know intimately. The familiar landscapes of my childhood felt both preserved and unrecognizable, caught in the flux of cultural transformation. This series unpacks that tension, reflecting on Romania’s evolving identity and the shifting relationship between memory, place, and belonging.
I weave together art historical references, Romanian folklore, and abstract architectural diagrams, constructing layered, non-linear “collages” that explore the concept of a new social utopia. By merging the structured with the organic, the historical with the speculative, I question how tradition survives, adapts, or dissolves in the face of westernization. The work is visually dense, capturing the interplay between nostalgia and progress, permanence and erasure. It blurs the boundaries between past and future, reality and imagination—creating a space where the fragmented echoes of history coalesce into something both deeply personal and universally resonant.
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About the Artist:
Emanuela Iuliana Sintamarian is an artist originally from Romania, but currently she lives and works in Oakland, CA.
Her work is informed by the relationship between her identity to her sense of displacement, and the ways she has devised to reconcile those incongruous elements. She is interested in perception, memory and the mechanics of motion, their visual translation, and the dichotomies intrinsic to them. She explores the fluidity and tension generated by contradictions: organized chaos and uncontrolled order, machine-like generated imagery, and imperfections, organized chaos and logical absurd. Ema also tends to adulterate the boundaries between representative and abstract. She leverages marks, colors, shapes, and textures to construct an undefined world, rather than mirror reality.
Ema’s work has been shown in solo and group shows at Sunny Art Center, London, UK; Museum of Contemporary Arts, Constanta, Romania; Museum of Art, Arad, Romania; Triton Museum in Santa Clara, CA; Jack Fischer Gallery, San Francisco, CA; the Delaware Center for the Contemporary Arts, DE; Rosenfeld Gallery in Philadelphia; Niklas Belenius Gallery in Stockholm, Sweden; Institute of Contemporary Art, CA and Angel Orensanz Foundation, New York, NY.
She was the recipient of the Leigh Weimer Award, (2021), the Artist Award SVCreates, San Jose, CA (2020), the Golden Foundation Fellowship, Golden Foundation, New Berlin, NY (2018), the Eureka Fellowship, Fleishhacker Foundation, San Francisco, CA (2013), ArtShift Award (2008) and the Silicon Valley Arts Council Award (2010). She is the finalist for the Sunny Art Award (2021), and has been nominated for SECA-SFMOMA-History Art Award, SF, CA.
Ema received her first MFA in printmaking from University of Delaware, and her second MFA in painting from San Jose State University. She is a Professor Associated at San Jose City College.
See more of her past projects and read more about Ema here at emahsin.com
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