COURAGE

connecting collections

Romii și regimul comunist din România: Marginalizare, integrare și opoziție (Roma and the communist regime in Romania: Marginalisation, integration, and opposition), which Manuela Marin edited and published in 2017, is based on more than two years of research on Roma people in communist Romania. It comprises over 1,000 pages of documents organised in two volumes. The documents were created by the state authorities, especially by the Romanian secret police, the Securitate, and approach various aspects of the life of the Roma between 1948 and 1989. Besides general topics relating to their social and economic situation, local structures of leadership, and traditions and customs, they also describe the activity of several Roma leaders, such as Nicolae Gheorghe and Ion Cioabă.

The selected documents which also form a great part of the Ad-hoc Collection show how Nicolae Gheorghe became preoccupied with the situation of Roma people, what the results of his researches were, and how with the help of his friend, Ion Cioabă, he lobbied the Romanian authorities to grant the Roma the status of a national minority. The volume also captures the way in which the issue of Roma marginalisation and discrimination in communist Romania brought Nicolae Gheorghe into close relations of collaboration with transnational Roma organisations. Consequently, it underlines how the leaders of these international organisations and renowned Roma activists, put additional pressure on the communist regime to cease its campaign of forced assimilation and to grant Roma people equal rights to those enjoyed by other national groups. Another topic that helped Nicolae Gheorghe and Ion Cioabă to build transnational ties was the compensation that Roma deported during World War II were entitled to receive from West Germany. Thus, Gheorghe, alone or with Cioabă, not only tried to convince the Romanian authorities to officially endorse their actions, but at the same time obtained the invaluable support of some international Roma organisations, which, in their turn, put pressure on West Germany to consider paying compensation to the deported Roma.

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.”