Dialogue with Ceausescu
"Dialogue with Ceausescu" is the most subversive and politically-charged of all of the video performances actualized by Ion Grigorescu during the 1970's, a work that was never showed by the artist to anyone before the fall of the regime. Shot on 8 mm (no sound) and lasting 7' 11'', it consists of a split-image, lines of text scrolling down while being superimposed over the image of Ion Grigorescu himself, while he is having a fake interview with a person wearing a mask of Ceausescu (also Grigorescu).
As Magda Radu points out in "Art and Politics: considering some of Ion Grigorescu’s films and photographs", "the two discourses run parallel and that there is no interaction whatsoever between the representative of the “people” and the one who embodies the power".
The meaning of the work resides in "the split between the textual and the verbal, as the neat body of the text, which shows no signs of pauses or interruptions, is in stark opposition with the tense atmosphere that exists between the “two” protagonists".
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