Turning the tables: émigré artists and the West during the Cold War
Turning the tables: émigré artists and the West during the Cold War

Summary/Abstract: This text considers the phenomenon of artists who left Romania during the Cold War, especially in the 1960s and 1970s. It focuses on a few examples through which various issues pertaining to cultural transfers and diasporic subjectivities are brought to the fore. Reactivating the memory of displacement becomes all the more necessary given that we find ourselves at a point in which we are urged to reflect on the change of the political regime in 1989. In regard to the intersection of East-West viewpoints that such a project reveals, an important line bringing together multiple positions is the articulation of a critical, lucid perception of the West, also throwing into relief the issue of the failure to adapt—sometimes compounded by a conscious refusal to do so—to the artistic mechanisms of the “free” world.

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