The Politics of Textiles in the Romanian Contemporary Art Scene

Textile: The Journal of Cloth and Culture, Vol. 12, (3), pp. 328-345, 2014

This article discusses the historical and social change associated with textiles in a rural setting in central Romania. Using ethnographic fieldwork with the Horniman Museum’s folk textile collection, it considers the transformation of traditional weaving in the source community. It highlights that the local perceptions of traditional fabrics are embedded in the narratives of practice and personhood. Weavers’ stories provide insights on the craftswomen’s adjustment to major historical transformations and ideas of modernity and femininity. This perspective sheds light on local values beyond fixed folk styles and traditional designs.

Art and Politics under Modern Dictatorships,, 2017

The artistic project of the Ceauşescu regime was profoundly marked by the personal intervention of the dictator. The official art abandoned the mandatory Socialist Realist style in favor of a privileged nationalistic version of art, which gradually turned into homage art. This chapter analyzes the ideological project of the Ceauşescu regime as well as the institutional structure dedicated to the artistic space, and looks at its policies, the use of censorship, and specific types of artistic expression that supported the official approach to the artistic domain, such as amateur art, homage painting, socialist comedies, music, and architecture.

World Art, 2017

This article discusses the relation between aesthetics, politics and ethics in the case of the making of a new display in the National Museum of the Romanian Peasant, following the demise of the communist state in Romania. It shows how the museum’s innovatory aesthetics of display, believed to be ‘escaping history’, in fact cannot avoid being the very product of history. The new aesthetics of display in the museum aimed to objectify and externalise ‘communism’ from the lives of people and institutions in Romania. Going beyond the stereotypical denominations ‘communist’ and ‘anti-communist’, this article aims to explain that demonising the communist past and building in opposition to its aesthetics, leads to actually incorporating and integrating communist values and modes of doing within the present display.

The Journal of Arts Management, Law, and Society

Artists are the first ones to react to their environment and to articulate a protest. Recent Romanian contemporary art questions the way communism is remembered or forgotten and the manner in which the postcommunist society was organized. This study uses the approach of politics and the arts to analyze both institutions and artistic discourses in Romania after 1989 in order to show how an artistic space is rebuilt after a dictatorial experience. The conclusions show that artists interrogate the “reconstruction” of democratic institutions and discourses on solid communist bases.

This paper will focus on analyzing how cultural revitalization movements function. By adopting three distinct theoretical vantage points, namely those of cultural analysis, anthropological semiotics and systems theory the semantically overburdened term 'culture' will be deconstructed. Culture is presented as a network of meanings from which people, based on the structural opportunities available to them in the context of their lives appropriate symbolic devices in order to construct "strategies of action". The capacity of these strategies to shape appropriate behavior in relation to the threats of a constantly shifting environment determines social stability. During unsettled periods individuals experience increased levels of psychosomatic stress which leads to the discontinuation of patterned behavior and can lead to complete societal implosion. It is during such periods that people are more willing to transfer the responsibility for their actions to agents who offer them the chance to participate in uniform processes of symbolic communication and strictly patterned behavior as long as it reinforces their perceived personal or collective identity. Recent years saw a cultural boom in Romania centered around the rediscovery of traditional textile crafts. Urban women across the nation mobilized in a unified movement to express their creativity but also their common identity by learning to create the Ia, the historic Romanian rural clothing, according to what they believe are the authentic historic rules. Promoting the appreciation for handmade crafts and a do-it-yourself lifestyle that the traditional Ia represents, they seek to solve the problems post-socialist Romanian society is facing and thus successfully engage in the process of cultural revitalization.

Convivium. Exchanges and Interactions in the Arts of Medieval Europe, Byzantium, and the Mediterranean. IV/1. Medieval Art in Prison, 2017

The role of medieval art in national-identity discourse has received too little attention in the historiography of Romania’s totalitarian regime of 1945 to 1989. Analyzing the concept of “Romanian Art”, this paper reveals traces of medieval art history under Soviet ideological pressure and opens the way to further investigation. The article explores the concept used mainly by other authors, including work disseminated by national-scale publishing houses throughout the Communist period and its aftermath. The process uncovers certain efforts to impose the term “Romanian medieval art” on the entire territory of Romania, especially around 1965. Works using the concept “Romanian Art” emerge chronologically in their political context, and they include official attitudes and theses related to the culture and historical writing. In addition, documents from a private archive function in the analysis. This way the diverse contributions of some medieval art historians to propagate the historical myths serving the regime’s propaganda – such as the myth of the unity of Romanians –, as well as some critical attitudes towards parts of the national ideology become more readily apparent.

Southeastern Europe, 2024

This article 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.

The Romanian cultural word was irremediable marked by the communist regime of Nicolae Ceauşescu's that started as a breath of fresh air for the artistic domain, and ended to be oppressive also because of the imposed aesthetics. From the early 70s the figure of Ceauşescu and of his wife Elena, started to be more and more present as a subject in the cultural press of the time and in exhibition. By the 80s, the dogmatic formulas of representation were supposed to be ideologically accurate and were subjected to scrutiny to a committee formed by artist and official of the communist party. On festive occasions the head of the Artists Union had a public positions to encourage the production of works in which the Romanian ruler to appear as an exemplary hero of the nation. Such analyze of context has the purpose to give us a wider picture of Romanian cultural background that can help to better understand the premises of the Romanian art scene after the fall of the communist regime.

Yearbook of the "Gheorghe Şincai" Institute for Social Sciences and the Humanities of the Romanian Academy, 2019

This paper proposes an overview of the intertwined streams of cultural, political, economic and social aspects that made up the fashion-consuming women’s interwar Bucharest, through the scope of fashion studies. For this, I will outline the extended methodological and conceptual scope which defines fashion studies in correlation with historical analysis. This wide range of research includes cultural anthropology, semiotics, sociology, cultural, gender and identity studies, adding to the technical, artistic, and philosophical implications already popular in pursuits of costume history. My paper will be centred around the idea of crafting illusions. I will use the word “craft” both in its magical and metaphysical sense, as in “witchcraft”, but also suggesting all aspects of craftsmanship. Therefore, my study deals with the conception, production, dissemination, consumption, and interpretation of fashionability. Drawing from this double-meaning, crafting illusions means invoking an idealised reality of prosperity, success, and power, which can hide a less glamorous reality. It can also be weaponised, from social control to building a national image. I will thus use the methods of fashion studies to interpret how the elegant Bucharester myth was constructed in an era of great upheavals. I aim to illustrate the fashion studies methodological and conceptual frameworks as a valid method of research, which has already been recognised as such in Western academia as a full-fledged discipline blending media, design, humanities, science, marketing, and politics. I will juxtapose the images seen in fashionable touristic spaces, such as Calea Victoriei, to the grim realities of a world recovering from past trauma, soon to delve into a new disaster. This will allow a snapshot of interwar Romania’s complexity through the lens of fashion.

2015

The principal objective of my research was to demonstrate that textiles may depict and do depict certain aspects of cultural exchange between the Roman Empire and the Barbaricum. I sought to demonstrate that fabrics were subject to similar, albeit not always the same, laws of exchange as other products of material culture. Furthermore, my research aimed to highlight the fact that studies of textiles explore ancient technology and the changes it underwent, thus indirectly delving into the history of ancient economy, social