Irina Gheorghe is an artist working primarily with performance, in combination with installation, photography, film or drawing. Her work addresses themes such as absence, displacement and disappearance, often engaging with entities or spaces inaccessible to observation through ephemeral artistic media. She is interested in techniques of estranging the everyday, abstraction as a language for interstellar communication and the absurd as the mood of interaction to a world beyond perception. Irina Gheorghe also works as part of the The Bureau of Melodramatic Research, a project co-founded in 2009 with artist Alina Popa (1982-2019) with the aim of investigating how passions shape contemporary society.
She studied painting and photography at the National University of Arts Bucharest and has completed a PhD in artistic practice at GradCAM/Technological University Dublin in 2021 with a project entitled "Betraying the Senses: Techniques of Estrangement, or How Art Speaks of What Is Not There". She is currently a post-doctoral researcher at the Vilnius Academy of Arts working on the project "Scores for the End of the Present: Notation Systems in Performative and Visual Arts and Their Relationship to Different Temporalities".