Andrei Ujică: Images in the World, Images in the Mind
Echoes and Distortions: Romanian Experimental Film and Video Art (Part II)
About The Event
The Romanian Cultural Institute in New York, in partnership with e-flux Screening Room, presents Andrei Ujică: Images in the World, Images in the Mind, an evening with acclaimed Romanian filmmaker, artist, and writer Andrei Ujică, featuring excerpts from Videograms of a Revolution (1992, co-directed with Harun Farocki), The Autobiography of Nicolae Ceaușescu (2010), and TWST / Things We Said Today (2024). Following the screening, an extended conversation between Andrei Ujică and Lukas Brasiskis, curator of video and film at e-flux, will focus on Ujică’s work and his wider thinking on cinema, art, history, politics, and society, with particular attention to the camera’s role in historical events, montage as a form of counter-historical narration, and the possibilities and limits of filmic art at a moment when moving images have become ubiquitous.
The evening will also mark the official launch of the English-language edition of Meridian, Andrei Ujică’s book of conversations with Claudia Nedelcu Duca, translated into English by Claudia and Andrew Davidson-Novosivschei and forthcoming from Sticking Place Books. To mark the launch, Ujică and Brasiskis will be joined by Devika Girish, Editor of Film Comment, for a discussion of Meridian, its conversations and ideas, and the ways in which the book illuminates Ujică’s reflections on cinema, history, politics, memory, and the trajectory of his own work. The English edition has been published with funding from the Romanian Cultural Institute through the TPS – Translation and Publication Support Programme, which supports the translation and publication of Romanian works for international audiences.
In the closing exchange of Meridian, Ujică draws on Paul Celan’s image of a line that returns to itself across both poles to describe the course his cinema has taken between what he calls the “grave” aesthetic and the “sharp” political ambitions of the generation of 1968. His films pursue this relationship through montage, often taking images whose original uses remain legible and reorganizing them into a different account of the past.
Videograms of a Revolution assembles Romanian television footage and amateur video into a chronology of December 1989, showing how recording and broadcasting became part of the revolution itself. Drawing on official footage, The Autobiography of Nicolae Ceaușescu imagines the dictator recalling his life in the moments before his death and examines how political power produces an image of itself. In TWST / Things We Said Today, fictional narration and animated drawings appear within broadcast footage and home movies from August 1965. A Beatles performance at Shea Stadium is at the center of the film, bringing the generational memory of Beatlemania into proximity with television reports of the Watts Rebellion.
In each film, the tension between recorded images and those formed through memory gives a different inflection to the relation between aesthetics and politics. The conversation will follow this tension across Ujică's works, with particular attention to the camera’s role in historical events, montage as a form of counter-historical narration, and the limits and potentials of the filmic art, now that moving images are ubiquitous.
Echoes and Distortions: Romanian Experimental Film and Video Art is a series curated by Andreea Drăghicescu, Romanian creative producer and cultural manager at the Romanian Cultural Institute in New York, in collaboration with Lukas Brasiskis, curator of video and film at e-flux, that foregrounds the crucial role experimental moving image practices have played in shaping Romania’s visual culture, particularly under and after the constraints of the communist regime. In a context where artistic expression was often surveilled or restricted, experimental film and video became vital tools for introspection, coded dissent, and formal innovation, contributing significantly to the broader history of Romanian avant-garde and contemporary art. The series traces this lineage from pioneering figures such as Ion Grigorescu, Geta Brătescu, Andrei Ujică, kinema ikon, Lia Perjovschi, or Decebal Scriba—artists who expanded the boundaries of image-making through performance, conceptual strategies, and film—toward a younger generation including artists like Rostopasca, Anca Benera & Arnold Estefan, Mircea Cantor, Radu Jude, Adina Pintilie, Alex Mirutziu, Apparatus 22, and many others who continue to explore the moving image as a space for critical reflection and experimentation. By bringing together historical and contemporary perspectives, the program highlights how Romanian experimental film and video art has persistently negotiated issues of identity, politics, embodiment, and perception, establishing itself as a vital and evolving field within both national and international art histories.
Following the inaugural program, Ion Grigorescu: Body, Camera, Resistance, presented at e-flux Screening Room in May 2026, this second chapter turns to Andrei Ujică and his sustained investigation of historical images, collective memory, and cinema’s capacity not simply to document history but to interrogate how history itself becomes visible, mediated, remembered, and narrated.
Discover the Filmmaker
ANDREI UJICĂ is a Romanian filmmaker and writer internationally recognized for his distinctive approach to archival cinema and his exploration of the relationship between history, memory, and the moving image. Born in Timișoara in 1951, he established himself in Germany, where his work evolved at the intersection of cinema, literature, and historical inquiry. He gained international recognition with Videograms of a Revolution (1992), co-directed with Harun Farocki, a landmark work constructed from television and amateur footage of the 1989 Romanian Revolution. His acclaimed Out of the Present (1995) follows cosmonaut Sergei Krikalev aboard the Mir space station during the dissolution of the Soviet Union, while The Autobiography of Nicolae Ceaușescu (2010), premiered at the Cannes Film Festival, reconstructs the Romanian dictator’s public life entirely through archival footage. Together, these films established Ujică as a major figure in contemporary documentary and essay cinema. His work, presented at international film festivals, museums, and cultural institutions worldwide, continues to investigate how images shape our understanding of history, political power, and collective memory.
Meet the Guest
DEVIKA GIRISH is the Editor of Film Comment. Her writing also appears in The New York Times, The New York Review of Books, The Criterion Collection, The Nation, Sight & Sound, The Village Voice, and other publications. She has served on the selection committees of the Berlin Critics’ Week and the Mumbai Film Festival, and on juries for CPH:DOX, the Locarno Film Festival, Visions du Réel, SEMINCI, and Karlovy Vary International Film Festival. Devika’s work has been recognized with a National Arts and Entertainment Journalism Award, a National Critics’ Institute Fellowship at the Eugene O’Neill Theater Center, and the inaugural Patricia Zimmerman Fellowship at the Flaherty Institute, among other honors.
Meet the Moderator
LUKAS BRASISKIS is Curator of Film and Video at e-flux and editor of the weekly publication e-flux Film Notes. He served as artistic director of the 13th Seoul Mediacity Biennale in 2025 and as a cocurator of the 14th Shanghai Biennale in 2023–24. His curatorial projects and film programs have been presented at MoMA, Anthology Film Archives, the Power Station of Art, the National Gallery of Art in Vilnius, and other institutions internationally. He holds a PhD in Cinema Studies from New York University and teaches at Columbia University and CUNY.
About the Book
Meridian — Andrei Ujică in Conversation with Claudia Nedelcu Duca
Translated by Claudia Davidson-Novosivschei & Andrew Davidson-Novosivschei and published in English by New York-based Sticking Place Books, Meridian offers English-language readers a rare opportunity to encounter the ideas and intellectual world of Andrei Ujică, one of the most distinctive voices in contemporary Romanian and European cinema.
Structured as an extended conversation between Andrei Ujică and Claudia Nedelcu Duca, the book moves across cinema, literature, history, politics, memory, and the personal experiences that have shaped the filmmaker’s life and work. At once reflective and wide-ranging, Meridian provides an illuminating companion to Ujică’s films, revealing the ideas, encounters, cultural references, and historical questions behind a body of work that has continually challenged conventional ways of representing the past.
Ujică is internationally recognized for his innovative use of archival images and for his exploration of the complex relationship between cinema and history. His landmark films include Videograms of a Revolution (1992), co-directed with Harun Farocki, which reconstructs the Romanian Revolution of 1989 through television broadcasts and amateur recordings; Out of the Present (1995), centered on cosmonaut Sergei Krikalev’s time aboard the Mir space station during the dissolution of the Soviet Union; and The Autobiography of Nicolae Ceaușescu (2010), an extraordinary cinematic portrait assembled entirely from archival footage produced during Ceaușescu’s years in power.
Seen alongside these films, Meridian opens another path into Ujică’s creative universe. Through conversation rather than montage, it brings the reader closer to a filmmaker and writer for whom images are never merely records of history, but active participants in the way history is constructed, remembered, and understood.
The English edition, translated by Claudia Davidson-Novosivschei and Andrew Davidson-Novosivschei, is published by Sticking Place Books. Its New York launch takes place on September 15 at e-flux Screening Room in Brooklyn, in the presence of Andrei Ujică, as part of an evening organized in partnership with the Romanian Cultural Institute in New York.
The publication arrives at a particularly significant moment for Ujică’s work in New York, coinciding with The Museum of Modern Art (MoMA)’s retrospective of his films, September 11–16. Together, the retrospective and the publication of Meridian offer New York audiences a rare opportunity to encounter both dimensions of Ujică’s work: the films themselves and the ideas, memories, and intellectual journeys that have informed them.
