This panel analyzes visual representations of the dictatorial past in post-communist Romania. Focusing on three types of media — video art, conceptual art, and autobiographical memory — the panel examines the plurimedial practices of artistically dealing with the past. Taking an interdisciplinary approach, the panel situates itself at the intersection of cultural memory studies and analyses focusing on the role of art in transitional justice processes. It zooms in on how artists evoke the past in their works. This reimagining of the past has the potential to advance a more nuanced perspective on the memory of the communist regime. Artists challenge the use of archives through innovative practices such as unarchiving. Certain artistic approaches, such as conceptualism, delineate a counter-history that deconstructs the monolithic perspective on the communist regime. Furthermore, examples of post-memory can be seen in artistic discourses that use autobiographical memory to question the nostalgic outlook observed in the Romanian public sphere over the last twenty years.
Caterina Preda, University of Bucharest, The Artistic Demystification of the Communist Regime in Romania, This paper explains the role played by contemporary art evocations of the communist past in the establishment of a more comprehensive memory of the communist regime in Romania. The analysis delineates the three memory frameworks of the communist regime in Romania (official memory, activist memory, and a nostalgic outlook) and contraposes them to the five artistic memory frameworks (Ceaușescu’s portraits, the 1989 revolution, the victims of communism, the portraits of the members of the Securitate, and the communist nostalgia) that have crystallized in the period 2000– 2020. Theoretically, the article uses the art and politics of memory focus, which is found at the intersection of the studies of cultural/artistic memory and the role of art in Transitional Justice studies, to propose a critical perspective on contemporary artistic discourses of the communist past in Romania.
Cristi Nae, Professor, National University of Art George Enescu, Iași. Unproductive Archiving: Opacity and Photographic Evidence in Video Art from Post-socialist Romania. In several of his video works, often expanded into large-scale installations, Dan Acostioaei investigates the discursive construction of historical facts by examining surviving material traces and the interplay between textual documents, documentary images, and different modes of narrative framing. While The Trial (2008) reconstructs the trial of Nicolae Ceaușescu from 1989, other recent projects such as Seas Under Deserts (2016-2025) filter subjective recollection through diverse photographic sources to revisit Romania’s relations with Syria and Iraq during the Cold War, thus reanimating marginalized or silenced histories. Similarly, other artists address the opacity of photographic evidence. In SCAN 01 (2025), Matei Bejenaru meticulously inspects a photograph from the Minerva socialist newspaper archive, questioning the ontological status of photographic truth, as well as our ability to transform such images into meaningful narratives. Andrei Nacu, in turn, reexamines archival footage of Ceaușescu’s execution in December 1989, underscoring the obscurity inherent in the recording apparatus. Through these case studies, the presentation explores video art’s capacity to act simultaneously as an investigative, forensic instrument and as a form of critical historical reconstruction—one that exposes gaps in collective memory while interrogating the medium’s own limitations in capturing and fabricating reality. As an extension of photography, video art inherits the same “archive fever” identified by Jacques Derrida and Okwui Enwezor, yet its intrinsic narrativity enables artists to engage in what Ernst van Alphen (2024) calls “unproductive archiving,” foregrounding the framing mechanisms that shape counter-memory (Young 1999; Tello 2022).
Andreea Elle Vas, PhD candidate, London College of Communications, University of the Arts London. Creative practice at the intersection of autobiographic memory and post-memory, official narratives and toxic nostalgia: post-socialist Romanian artists (r)evoking their past under dictatorship. Romania’s dictatorial past under the regime of Nicolae Ceausescu, culminating with a particularly brutal decade in the 1980s, has a long-lasting legacy that continues to shift and morph more than three decades past its turbulent end. It was as late as 2006 when the final report of the Presidential Committee for the Analysis of the Communist Dictatorship in Romania officially acknowledged the crisis of the 1980s as ‘one of the most severe in the entirety of Romania’s history’. However, to this date, and on the back of rising ultranationalism, pro-Ceausescu narratives are becoming common ground. There has been an emergence of contemporary Romanian practitioners in literary and visual arts who inhabit the space of post-socialist remembrance and create diverse expressions of counter-narrative memory from a shared dictatorial past. Starting from the role that artistic discourses have in disrupting the status quo and fighting toxic nostalgia, this paper explores the opportunities and difficulties that these artists have in their complex situation as practitioners and experiential raconteurs. Specifically, the paper looks at post-memory and the impact of possibly unacknowledged past familial trauma on the practitioner’s creative choices, the challenges of methodological approaches rooted in autobiography and autoethnography when working with collective memory recreation, and the personal, wellbeing and ethical dilemmas in working with trauma-informed practice.
Olivia Nițiș, PhD, Researcher at the Institute of Art History "G.Oprescu" of the Romanian Academy. A (Non)Monolithic Image of the Past A curatorial perspective on Romanian and Czech conceptual art behind and beyond the Iron Wall. Conceptual art in Eastern Europe analyzed today clearly questions our comfortable ideas on art and politics. Living in an oppressive regime represented a limitation to freedom, yet the intellectual needs and possibilities of self-expression functioned beyond political gestures. This study is shaped by a research curatorial work for the exhibition A Spring of Hope A Winter of Despair (Faber/Timișoara and Praovka/Prague, 2024) that included a selection of conceptual art works from 1970s and 1980s, and from post communism, by Romanian and Czech artists. Built around historical frameworks and inviting for the observation of similar conceptual and aesthetic discourses along different timeframes, the current study looks at the role of dominant historical narratives in shaping (un)nuanced interpretations of the past when dealing with conceptual artistic representations. To what extent do these images reflect a common narrative about the communist regime, and how do they challenge our memory? To what extent can we talk about Eastern conceptual art in political terms? A transhistorical and transnational perspective through the method of visual proximity and situated research challenges traditional curatorial practices, leading to a different understanding of the past, while raising questions around artist's political awareness, artistic intent, and personal and collective interest. Building a case around counter histories, the presentation addresses the role of art practices in shaping memory, and the role of memory in shaping image interpretation in the absence and in the presence of context, creating a ”(non)monolithic image” of the past. In the process of acknowledging multiple voices against a dominant narrative, my presentation takes note of the relevance of ”situated knowledge” (Harraway)
20260731T140020260731T1530America/Argentina/Buenos_Aires9.9. Artistic Strategies of Memorialization in Post-Communist Romania: Unarchiving, Auto-Biographic Memory and Conceptual Counter-HistorySV304MSA Buenos Aires 2026buenosairesconference@memorystudiesassociation.org
