Olga Stefan

The article examines experimental films and photographs produced by Romanian artists. Particular focus is given to how these works have been influenced by Communism. Various artists working in the 20th and 21st-centuries in Romania are examined, including Ion Grigorescu, Kinema Ikon and Geta Brătescu.

Laughter and Forgetting is a group show that explores the malleability of memory, pain of laughter, the interrelationship between public and private life, and the deception of human relationships, taking its start from Milan Kundera's The Book of Laughter and Forgetting written in 1978 and published while in exile in Paris. The participating artists address the themes of laughter, forgetting, love, litost (the untranslatable Czech word that refers to a special type of regret), angels (symbols of totalitarianism) and the border that develop in Kundera's text musically through repetition, and are presented in the exhibition through expanded video and photography projects that reflect these media's relationship to the construction and alteration of history, elicitation of affective responses, or the actual documentation of past experience. The architecture of the MeetFactory was especially conceived to guide us organically in and out of the rooms where the works are arranged in loosely thematic groupings, establishing additional meanings through their proximity to each other as we glide through the porous space delineators that rather than divide, remind us of both the limits and possibilities that borders pose. As is the condition of categories in our contemporary society, so in the exhibition the lines separating artists' works based on these specific themes are blurred, a more metaphorical way for borders to be crossed and resistance to the totalitarian imposition of a singular meaning to be expressed. Therefore, despite the works primarily falling into one of six themes mentioned above, they also overlap and melt into each other.

As Chicago remembers through exhibitions, lectures, articles, radio programs, and other events a pivotal moment of 40 years ago when, during a hot August, our city, like the rest of the country, was at war with itself, we catch glimpses of protesters being beaten by police, Richard J. Daley trampling on every right this country holds dear, and artists' responses to the " bloodbath. " What we have not seen, however, is an inquiry into the role of Chicago's artists in the protests themselves, and how the movement utilized art to advance its cause and make it accessible to the wider public. Exhibitions like 1968: Art and Politics in Chicago at the DePaul University Museum of Art and Looks Like Freedom at DOVA on the University of Chicago campus show responses – but did visual art and artists actually play a role in communicating the message of the protest movement to the public at large during that week of the convention? And was it effective? " Art doesn't have the power to do that, and I don't think it should be used for that, " says Chicago abstract painter Vera Klement. Klement adds that she did , however, participate in the Lo Giudice Gallery benefit show in support of the protesters, as many other local and national artists did, but the content of the work was not always political. The story of the Paris uprisings of May 1968, just a few months before the Chicago convention, looks very different. Artists, students, and workers came together for a stunningly choreographed protest, where the message of the movement was branded and disseminated through scores of art posters, which remain testaments to the power of visual images to persuade and move people to action. The theorists behind the political movement were the Situationists, a group of Marxist artists and

Play film……an exhibition in Iasi. Play audio…My migration with my own child just like my mother once with me, back to the city we had once rejected, a mirroring of the past, prompted the beginning of my search into family memory and the marks it leaves on our identity. Through these narratives we come into contact with our unknown selves, hidden by time and space, political and personal forgetting and erasure. The Holocaust, which affected both sides of my family, was a violent historical event that struck not only its direct victims, but also the generations that came after. For most of us in the third generation of survivors, this "residue of the past" is the beginning of our personal stories. Read: Edgar Hilsenrath was born in Halle, Germany, then migrated to Siret, Bukowina with his family in 1941 in order to escape Nazi persecution, only to be deported in 1942 by order of Marshall Ion Antonescu and interned in the ghetto of Mogilyov-Podolski until March 1944, when the Russian troops took over. He was then arrested by them and nearly deported to a coal-pit in Donbass, but after faking his identity documents, was let go. He slowly made his way back to Siret, then to Palestine as an idealist Zionist youth, where he stayed a few years before returning, disillusioned, to France to reunite with his family who had emigrated illegally through postwar Europe. He wrote Night, one of the most harrowing novels about wartime captivity, mass death and unlikely survival in the cruellest of conditions and facing unimaginable deprivations, also because he felt 'guilty for surviving' when most around him didn't. He speaks of loss, remembering and forgetting, the traces that were left and that will disappear, and of course human depravity. His biography and Night, not yet translated in neither Romanian nor Russian, were included in the July 2017 Kishinev exhibition of the 'The Future of Memory,' the transnational multi-city platform for Holocaust and Porajmos remembrance through art and media in Romania and the Republic of Moldova, two countries on the periphery of Europe. This story of migration, marginalisation, self-questioning, analysis of identity, disillusionment, and search for meaning in such overwhelming meaninglessness, is common to all the biographies included in the interdisciplinary platform, whose unique approach is to combine contemporary and modern visual art practices with historical research, literature, film and performance, tackling the themes from different angles, performing local archives, and thereby reactivating the memory of the forgotten victims on the edge of the continent and in the borderlands, where much of the mass killing and cultural erasure took place. What remained are only small traces of the former Jewish and Roma habitation and influence within the current emptiness which is in itself a mark of past presence. Holocaust education has focused mainly on the extermination camps at Auschwitz and the Nazi crimes, but the mass extermination in Transnistria, the land between Europe and the Soviet Union, committed at the order of Ion Antonescu, has been mostly ignored. 'The Future of Memory' reintegrates into mainstream Romanian Holocaust historiography this unspoken chapter through the microhistories of the victims and survivors which testify to this historical truth that has been effaced for decades. Firstly, the biographies that we present in the art exhibitions or the archive we researched and compiled are organised in geographically specific groups, growing out of the cities in which we operated. The exhibitions and events in each city feature little known, and in many cases entirely unknown, personalities who were first introduced to the general public in the frame of 'The Future of Memory', or if they are already known, we introduced work by them heretofore unknown or unpublished locally. The events were scheduled to occur on the days commemorating pogroms or mass deportations. The Future of Memory combines research, documentation, and exhibitions carried out by me, as the initiator of the project, with contemporary art responses to this archive and the project´s material undertaken by artists invited to partake in the project. Slide 3 Bucharest, January 20-27, 2017 In Bucharest at Casa Filipescu-Cesianu (part of the Municipal Museum of Bucharest), we featured projections of paintings and photographs by artists Hedda Sterne (b. Bucharest, 1910, d. New York,

Publication for the exhibition Love in the Time of Social Media, March 2019, Kunstraum Walcheturm, Zurich, curated by Olga Stefan.  Group show deals with the political ramifications of social media use, and the proliferation of online hatred.