Andrei Ujică: Images in the World, Images in the Mind

Join us at e-flux Screening Room on Tuesday, September 15, 2026 at 7pm for Images in the World, Images in the Mind, an evening with the acclaimed Romanian filmmaker, artist, and writer Andrei Ujică featuring excerpts from Ujică's Videograms of a Revolution (1992, co-directed with Harun Farocki), The Autobiography of Nicolae Ceaușescu (2010), and TWST / Things We Said Today (2024). Following the screening, an extended conversation moderated by Lukas Brasiskis will focus on Ujică's works and his wider thinking on cinema, art, and society.

In the closing exchange of Meridian—his book of conversations with Claudia Nedelcu Duca, forthcoming in English from Sticking Place Books—Ujică draws on Paul Celan's image of a line that returns to itself across both poles to describe the course his cinema has taken between what he calls the "grave" aesthetic and the "sharp" political ambitions of the generation of 1968. His films pursue that relation through montage, often taking images whose original uses remain legible and reorganizing them into a different account of the past.

Videograms of a Revolution assembles Romanian television footage and amateur video into a chronology of December 1989, showing how recording and broadcasting became part of the revolution itself. Drawing on official footage, The Autobiography of Nicolae Ceaușescu imagines the dictator recalling his life in the moments before his death and examines how political power produces an image of itself. In TWST / Things We Said Today, fictional narration and animated drawings appear within broadcast footage and home movies from August 1965. A Beatles performance at Shea Stadium is at the center of the film, bringing the generational memory of Beatlemania into proximity with television reports of the Watts Rebellion.

In each film, the tension between recorded images and those formed through memory gives a different inflection to the relation between aesthetics and politics. The conversation will follow this tension across Ujică's works, with particular attention to the camera’s role in historical events, montage as a form of counter-historical narration, and the limits and potentials of the filmic art, now that moving images are ubiquitous.

This event is organized in partnership with the Romanian Cultural Institute in New York and is the second in Echoes and Distortions: Romanian Experimental Film and Video Art, a new RCI New York series initiated and curated by Andreea Drăghicescu, developed and programmed with e-flux Screening Room. The series offers an introduction to a major yet still underrecognized history of Romanian experimental moving-image practice. 

For more information, contact program@e-flux.com.

Accessibility
– The entrance at 172 Classon Avenue is reached by two flights of stairs.

– For elevator access, please RSVP to program@e-flux.com. The freight-elevator entrance is beside the garage door nearest 180 Classon Avenue. A ramp is available for the steps inside.

– An ADA-compliant restroom is accessible from the event space without steps.