“Antinostalgia” investigates the relationship between the public sphere and the individual memory of private life, bringing also a cathartic, “repairing” approach through the photographic image.

The exhibition is organized by the Museum of the Horrors of Communism in Romania in partnership with the National Museum of Art Timisoara.

“Antinostalgia” is a vaccine, whose reactions can be manifested in a wide range of emotions, in which resilience or repulsion towards the past is a sign of healing.

The two valences of memory, affective and collective, are completed in a montage of photographs and collages – which act as memory terminals of an era dominated by the cult of Ceausescu’s personality.

The artist Ion Isaila is known to the romanian public through his graphic works and collages conceived during his first arrival in Germany, after he left Romania.

Inspired by the everyday country life in the 1980s, now can be seen as “manifesto collages”.

The artist then undertook to signal the abuses of the regime, addressing not the art galleries, but directly the German and Romanian public, in a genuine impulse of social and cultural activism.

Andrei Pandele’s photographs offer perhaps the widest panorama of images of Ceausescu’s Romania. An architect by trade, Andrei Pandele is one of the main clandestine and courageous photographers of the “golden age”.

As he states, he did not act against communism, but photographed what was around him. His snapshots and compositions represent true capsules of time, encapsulating an entire world, which we are urged not to idealise and not to revive.

The exhibition is hosted by National Museum of Art Timisoara, opened to July 20, 2022.