kinema ikon—Experiments in Motion (1970–89)

Abstract

This chapter explores the activities of the Romanian experimental arts group kinema ikon between 1970 and 1989. What did experimental aesthetics mean in an institutional environment policed by the Communist state? And how did international avant-garde movements such as Dada and Fluxus inform the group’s artistic position and the local “scene”? In a context dominated by rigid definitions of art, was film a preferred support for kinema ikon’s ambitious theoretical and aesthetic program because of its material flexibility? This chapter demonstrates that the group’s contribution to the history of experimental art and film cannot be located exclusively in the local—Romanian, or even Eastern European—context, emphasizing how this idiosyncratic collective reached beyond its rather finite, preassigned universe.