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Video and film / Video exercises / Video installation / Video letter / Video muster / Video interview / Video opera  /  Video about art  /  Video documents  /  Video as video

Although this is a private collection, its owner has been rather active in the public sphere. A recent important event in the dissemination of the collection and of Moroșanu’s personal experience as a dissident was his participation in a TV show dedicated to the “anti-Communist resistance” during the Soviet period. Broadcast on 16 June 2017 on one of the most popular TV channels in the country – Jurnal TV – and moderated by historian Octavian Țâcu, this show featured Moroșanu and historian Ion Țurcanu as invited speakers. Moroșanu was presented to the audience as an ”emblematic figure of anti-Communist resistance.” The show focused on the sources and motivations of Moroșanu’s anti-Communist attitudes. Moroșanu dwelled at length on the personal roots of his anti-Communism, which were linked to his traumatic family experience of deportation. He also spoke about the criminal case opened against him in 1966, as well as about the earlier incident involving the statue of Stephen the Great in 1964, which led to his systematic surveillance by the KGB. Especially in this latter case, he provided valuable personal information. For example, he detailed his strategy for mobilising student youth and was outspoken concerning the persons responsible for attempting to block his initiative. Given the fact that this show was part of a broader series of thematic broadcasts on historical topics popular with educated urban audiences, the impact of this public display of Moroșanu’s role as a prominent dissident was undoubtedly significant.

Art+Text Budapest
January 27–February 17, 2017

Between 18 and 25 May 2017, the exhibition “Ucenicie printre arte: Sorin Costina colecționar” (Apprenticeship among arts: Sorin Costina collector) was held in Bucharest. The event was organised by the public cultural service ARCUB – the Cultural Centre of the City of Bucharest, which provided free public access to the exhibition. Among the artists whose works were on display were Corneliu Baba, Horia Bernea, Ștefan Bertalan, Paul Gherasim, Ion Grigorescu, Florin Mitroi, Paul Neagu, Florin Niculiu, Ion Dumitriu, Constantin Flondor, and Sorin Dumitrescu.

“Bringing together over forty of the most significant paintings in the Sorin Costina collection, the ARCUB exhibition is the first and most extensive presentation both of the diversity and scope of the collection and of its significance as a central landmark in what has, in time, proved to have become the canon of Romanian art of the 1970s to 1990s. The exhibition is thus the occasion not only for an overview of this canon, but also for lucid and critical investigation of the beliefs and aspirations, but also the practices, the clichés and stylistic and ideological hybridisations that marked Romania art in that troubled period of the last decades of the second millennium.” So states the official catalogue of this exhibition, which in the first half of 2017 was one of the cultural events of greatest resonance in the Romanian capital. With regard to the entire collection, the catalogue continues: “The man Sorin Costina and the distinctive history of Romanian culture and society in the second half of the twentieth century have caused the appearance in the most atypical place possible of the most typical collection of Romanian postwar art, in which all the key names of Romanian visual culture are to be found, with exceptional pieces. The Sorin Costina collection is a compendium of contemporary Romanian art. A certain part of Romanian art, after the 1960s.”

Exhibition Wild Graphics. Half a Century of Visual Diversion in Poland 1967-2017 was the first such wide in terms of subject and chronology presentation of art appearing on the streets of Polish cities from the 1960s to the second decade of the twentieth century.

The exhibition, whose musical setting was created by Robert Brylewski (musician of Kryzys, Brygada Kryzys, Army, Max and Waiter, Falarek Band, Witch's World, 52um and many other experimental projects) was an extremely diverse review in terms of formal and range of cases. There were records of happenings, performances and other artistic activities in the public space, carried out in the sixties and seventies by the entire galaxy of Polish neo-avant-garde artists, photos of graffiti, inscriptions on the walls, stickers, posters and installations, as well as original graffiti templates, stickers leaflets and other materials preserved to this day. The topics discussed in the presented works were even more varied, from political issues and current social affairs, through aesthetic and existential issues, to quarrels between fans of various football clubs or the internal rivalry of street writers.

Curators - Tomasz Sikorski, Marcin Rutkiewicz, and Michał Warda - presented in the form of photos, slideshows, films and showcases with original objects, a total of 1,500 examples of unofficial, self-controlled, uncontrolled creative activity on the streets of Polish cities, regardless of the artistic level or political message. Under these circumstances, Wild Graphics as an exhibition and the publication accompanying it is an excellent summary of spontaneous expression and social dialogue on the streets of Polish cities of the last half-century. Tomasz Sikorski interprets this broad approach in his text, proposing the concept of "art on streets" as more containing and less appraisal than street art or graffiti.