What is left today, in the age of globalization, of our European identity – here is a disquieting question, which cannot be answered spontaneously. To find an answer, we have to question ourselves and, at the same time, to look at the various data coming from our every-day life and from the contemporary artistic environment. If an identity is defined in relation with the other, with Otherness, then the contemporary society is facing a serious crisis, the result of many fragmented identities. Because of the confrontation with strange and diverse identities, there have been confused, plural, contradictory developments at the global scale, or, sometimes, marginal and subaltern positions have been accepted…
In the totalitarian communist regimes, the artists, with their projects, systematically opposed the erasure of identities and the enforced levelling, militating for the freedom of expression, for the assertion of the individual as such, with their own identity, undistorted under ideological pressure. For the artists in the 1980s generation (who continued to express themselves freely especially after 1990) the body was considered a means of expression charged with raw and even brutal power. The artists researched this topic thoroughly, without avoiding its controversial aspects.
Read the whole text by Ileana Pintilie and view more exhibition photos, here