The Art Encounters Biennial, which casts itself as a cross between an experimental art festival and a contemporary art biennial, has announced that Mihnea Mircan and Kasia Redzisz will cocurate its fourth edition, to be held October 1–November 14 in Timisoara, Romania. Mircan, a curator, writer, and PhD candidate at Melbourne’s Monash University, was previously artistic director of Extra City Kunsthal in Antwerp, Belgium; Redzisz, formerly of Tate Modern, London, is senior curator at Tate Liverpool.

Titled “Our Other Us,” this year’s biennial will present two curatorial projects exploring empathy and responsibility as drivers of human existence, focusing on various modes of collectivity as well as on transformations that affect self-perception. In exhibitions taking places at various locations throughout the city and featuring commissions from the region’s emerging artists, the curators will address global concerns, placing them in the context of local history and modern life.

Mircan’s exhibition, titled “Landscape in a Convex Mirror,” will center around the theme of vertigo “as a modus operandi: a methodology of attention, a composition of vanishing points, of degrees and units of measure for directions, intensities, and cadence,” the curator said.

Redzisz limned her own proposal as consisting of two exhibitions, “a regional, historical survey investigating the relationship between artists and nature and its contemporary counterpart.” She added that it was her hope that the two shows together would “present proposals for meaningful coexistence in the world, not a simple critique of the present moment, but a stimulating reflection on our possible futures.”

The exhibitions will be accompanied by a public program comprising performances, screenings, talks, and presentations.