BOOK LAUNCH – Cristina Modreanu

Cristina Modreanu: Utopii performative (Performative Utopias)
Radical artists of the 21st century American scene

Having at its center the acute question, What does it mean today to be contemporary?, the American scene, especially that of New York, gravitates around an attempt to define the role of art in society. It also endeavours to rediscover from new perspectives the reference points of the past, based on a critical observation of the present and on bold predictions of the future, which integrate innovations from different territories united in their aspiration to imagine a reconfigured profile of the human being in the digital age.”
Cristina Modreanu

I think it is important to emphasize the fact that many of the author’s subjects have an intense way of relating to their society and to the problems of the age they live in. Be it expressly political or tangential, be it critical, examining the movement of certain ideas in society, and expressing a radical interrogative attitude, their spectacles and performances create the special dynamic of certain arts which are not arts per se anymore, but visual-performative discourses about the nature of the human being in a polymorphous present.
Marian Popescu

Cristina Modreanu: Fluturele gladiator (The Gladiator Butterfly)
Political, queer & feminist theatre in the Romanian scene
drawings by Dan Perjovschi

An intensive return has been recorded from the beginning of the 21st century in the international theatrical scene of creators who transcribe in their performances an attitude towards their surrounding reality, activating thus the militant side of the most social of the arts. In the last decade, to which the essays of the volume refer, the balance in the Romanian scene also has inclined from aesthetics to ethics, which have inscribed the Romanian theatre into the global tendency. For the first time after the effervescence of the nineties, a new synchronization of the Romanian scene and the world of ideas of the international avant-garde have occurred through the political theatre.
Cristina Modreanu’s essays refer to the creations of representative Romanian directors, such as Radu Afrim, Gianina Cărbunariu, Alexandru Dabija, and many others. The drawings of the renowned artist Dan Perjovschi synthetize the contemporary subject matters treated by the book.