Perspectives on art, political imaginaries and realpolitik
July 22–27, 2025
This six-day intensive, July 22–27, 2025 in Iași and Chișinău brings artists, curators and theorists together to exchange practices and perspectives on art, political imaginaries and realpolitik. It includes screenings, presentations, site and studio visits, performance work, an evening of Radio Listening, a red thread of daily group reflection and a series of informal social gatherings. Participation is free, however, in person places are limited, book here by June 22. We provide the bus transport from Iași to Chișinău and return for the first 25 bookings. All other costs are borne by the participants. There is also the possibility of attending part of the programme online, book here for online access.
Contributor include: Luminița Apostu Toma (Iași), Valeria Barbas (Chișinău ), Florin Bobu & Livia Pancu (tranzit.ro/ Iași, 1+1), Nora Dorogan & Nicoleta Esinencu (Teatru-Spalatorie, Chișinău ), Lilia Dragneva (Ksa:k, Chișinău), Chris Dreier & Gary Farrelly (Office for Joint Administrative Intelligence, Brussels, Berlin), Tatiana Fiodorova (Chișinău), Cătălin Gheorghe (George Enescu Art University Iași), Minna Henriksson (Helsinki), Kristina Jacot (Chișinău ), Cezar Lăzărescu (Iași), Diana Mărgărit & Adrian Cioflâncă (Iasi / Bucharest), Maxim Polyakov (3rd space / Kolhoz/ Drujba), Ghenadie Popescu (Chișinău), Andrei Pripasu (ZO Kraft, Iași), Vitalie Sprînceană (Platzforma.md, Chișinău), Oana Toderică (Iași), Vladimir Us (Oberliht Association, Chișinău), Mick Wilson (HDK-Valand/CAPIm, Gothenburg). Full programme posted shortly here.
Questions of the political within artistic practice and wider art systems unfold with increasing intensity in recent decades. At the same time we see radical upheaval in the actualities of everyday political cultures locally, nationally, and internationally. We ask are established forms of engagement across art and the political adequate? What might a mobile viewpoint between Iași and Chișinău offer to thinking these questions?
The question of the vantage point and (Post)socialism
The collapse of the Cold War geopolitical (dis)order and the neoliberal globalisation that followed are still contested, even as the latter seems to collapse. For some, (Post)socialism becomes an identity issue: the identity of a region, “the east” no longer simply contrasted with “the west”, but placed in essential opposition so that differences within and across the many (Post)socialisms are no longer visible. Amid new great power territorial politics, what differences can be seen beyond these dichotomies of east and west? What is gained and what is lost in our ability to think the present from this essentialization of “the socialist past” and “the region”?
Iași and Chișinău
Chișinău and Iași, physically less than 150 kilometers distant from each other, offer between them a vantage point that troubles any simple reduction of perspective to geography. Chișinău, the capital of the Republic of Moldova, has made its historical journeys through the geopolitical upheavals, reversals and successive waves of expansion and withdrawal by Ottoman and Russian empires. Iași, located at the north-eastern edge of Romania; formerly at the centre of the principality of Moldavia and formerly part of the northern limit of the Ottoman empire, is now a border city of the European Union, in close proximity to the Russian war on Ukraine? These neighbouring cities stage an opportunity to think multiply the question of perspective.
Each city has generated its own particular cultural field and its own cultural energies and dynamics at similar scale and at what may be seen as the intersection areas of larger political conglomerates. Artistic scenes such as Iași and or Chișinău may allow mobile vantage points because of the intersections and tensions of these larger political conglomerates but also because of their specificity and their relative independence.
Co-organised by tranzit.ro/ Iași in partnership with 1+1 association, HDK-Valand Academy of Art and Design, and as an associated initiative of the Centre for Art and the Political Imaginary (CAPIm).
