Maria-Alina Asavei – författare

Should politically concerned and engaged artistic production disregard questions or/and requirements of aesthetic reception and value? Whether art should be “aesthetic” or “political” is not a new question. Therefore, in spite of those several contemporary approaches of this issue, the answer is not set in stone and the debate is still going on. This volume aims to broaden these debates and it stems from numerous conversations with politically engaged artists and artist collectives on issues related to the “aesthetitzation of politics” versus the “politicization of art,” as well as the phenomenon of the so-called “unhealthy aestheticism” in political art. Thus, this study has three interrelated aims: Firstly, it aims to offer an interdisciplinary account of the relationship between art and politics and between aesthetics and the political. Secondly, it attempts to explore what exactly makes artistic production a strong – yet neglected – field of political critique when democratic political agency, history from below and identity politics are threatened. Finally, to illuminate the relationship between critical political theory, on the one hand, and the philosophy of art, on the other by highlighting artworks’ moral, political and epistemic abilities to reveal, criticize, problematize and intervene politically in our political reality.

In their collective dimension, memories are fluid—their form and content constantly adjusted by locations, places, generations, cultures, traditions, politics, epistemic authorities, and historical predictabilities.Contrary to the notion of memory as a static repository of facts, this volume examines the malleability of collective memory, exploring how memories are constantly adjusted and re-shaped in a temporal and spatial dimension of meaning-making. The contributors in this volume do not address memory in its psychological dimension. Instead, they explore the mnemonic materializations in cultural and social settings, treating memory as a powerful force that shapes the identity of societies, cultures, and communities. It is the tapestry of shared experiences, narratives, and symbols that define how a group remembers its past. This volume explores how societies actively construct meanings around these collective recollections and argues that collective memory is often constructed, reconstructed, negotiated, and questioned to serve various ends.

This book illuminates the interconnections between politics and religion through the lens of artistic production, exploring how art inspired by religion functioned as a form of resistance, directed against both Romanian national communism (1960-1989) and, latterly, consumerist society and its global market.