PostModernism Museum, Romania
On Friday 28 August 2026, PostModernism Museum (Romania) presents the international conference ”From Archive to Arena: Culture, Memory and Resilience – Eastern European Perspectives” at Frihamnsdagarna, the Gothenburg democracy festival held on Bananpiren from 27 to 29 August with free admission.
The conference is organised with the support of the Cantemir Programme 2026 of the Romanian Cultural Institute, in partnership with Space-time Works (Lund, Sweden) and Radio Romania International.
The discussion is held in English.
How are historical narratives, images and cultural symbols weaponised – and how can art and visual culture serve as sources of democratic resilience?
The conference brings together four Romanian scholars and practitioners working at the intersection of geopolitics, history, culture, memory and democratic resilience, and examines how totalitarian and authoritarian regimes have constructed, disseminated and recycled cultural narratives, from Cold War propaganda to contemporary digital disinformation. It draws on primary archival research carried out since 2015 within the DARE programme (Documentation, Archiving, Re-evaluation, Exhibition) of PostModernism Museum.
The speakers
Antonia Colibășanu opens the geopolitical frame with a talk on the geopolitics of disinformation and the erosion of institutional trust.
She is Senior Geopolitical Analyst at Geopolitical Futures and Associate Professor of geopolitics and geoeconomics at the National University of Political Studies and Public Administration in Bucharest. She was a 2024 Templeton Fellow in the Eurasia Program at the Foreign Policy Research Institute, sits on the Scientific Council of the Elcano Royal Institute and is a senior associate expert with the New Strategy Center. She spent over ten years at Stratfor, where she was partner for Europe, and among her books is Geopolitics, Geoeconomics and Borderlands: A Study of a Changing Eurasia and Its Implications for Europe.
Cosmin Popa traces Russian influence strategies from the Cold War to contemporary hybrid warfare.
A historian and senior researcher at the ”Nicolae Iorga” Institute of History of the Romanian Academy, he specialises in the history of the USSR and Russia and of Central and South-Eastern Europe in the communist and contemporary periods. He is a member of the Joint Commission of Historians of Romania and the Russian Federation and of the Romanian-Russian commission on Romania’s Treasure, held in Moscow since the First World War, sits on the editorial board of the anti-disinformation platform Veridica, and is author of studies on Soviet strategy in Central Europe, on Ceaușescu’s intellectuals and on the political economy of communist Romania.
Adrian Cioflâncă addresses the visual documentation of atrocity – how photographs of mass violence became weapons of propaganda in Eastern Europe.
He is a researcher at the ”A. D. Xenopol” Institute of History of the Romanian Academy in Iași and, since 2015, director of the ”Wilhelm Filderman” Centre for the Study of the History of Jews in Romania, within the Federation of Jewish Communities of Romania. He has sat on the board of the National Council for the Study of the Securitate Archives since 2012 and has been an expert in Romania’s delegation to the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance since 2005. He was a member of the International Commission on the Holocaust in Romania, chaired by Elie Wiesel, and an expert in the Presidential Commission for the Analysis of the Communist Dictatorship in Romania, co-authoring the final reports of both.
Cosmin Nasui brings in the subject of art and art history as propaganda and resistance – visual culture under totalitarian regimes, and artists and art historians in political detention.
An art historian, critic and curator, he coordinates the DARE programme at PostModernism Museum and founded modernism.ro, the largest Romanian online platform for contemporary art. He is managing editor of the series of volumes Artists and Art Historians in the Political Detention of Totalitarian Regimes in Romania and has published on artists and art historians who served as Securitate agents on international cultural missions, on the image war waged through far-right publications in Romania, and on the physiognomies of the personality cult from Carol II to Ceaușescu. His curatorial programme Moving Monuments has travelled from the Liverpool Biennial and the European Parliament in Brussels to Kyiv, Mykolaiv and Dnipro.
The conversation is moderated by Burak Sayin, a Sweden-based cultural strategist and urban innovation expert at Space-time Works Lund and a former board member of Culture Action Europe, one of Europe’s largest cultural advocacy networks. He is a PhD researcher at Lund University working on cultural and creative hubs and he worked for more than 6 years as a Community Manager at Trans Europe Halles. He began his career as a journalist in Turkey and has worked for Associated Press Television News, the Huffington Post and Al Jazeera America.
Context: culture recognised as democratic infrastructure
The project ”From archive to arena: culture, memory and resilience – Eastern European perspectives” gains momentum as European institutions explicitly acknowledge the role of culture in defending democracy.
In November 2025, meeting under the Danish Presidency of the Council of the European Union, culture and media ministers from 26 of the 27 EU member states, Romania among them, together with the United Kingdom, Ukraine, Iceland, Norway and Switzerland, signed a joint declaration, ”Declaration on the Necessity of Culture and Media as a Safeguard for Our European Democracies”, affirming that culture, independent media and Europe’s cultural heritage are crucial to European democratic resilience, and calling for the protection of culture and cultural heritage to be treated as an integral part of European security policy.
Also in November 2025 the European Commission adopted both the European Democracy Shield, which gathers measures against foreign information manipulation and interference, and the Culture Compass for Europe, its first major strategic framework for culture since the 2018 New European Agenda for Culture.
The Shield warns that Russia’s hybrid tactics reach deep into ”the fabric of our societies”, and that deceitful narratives – sometimes involving the manipulation and falsification of historical facts – are used to erode trust in democratic systems.
The two documents point to one another: the Culture Compass ties the safeguarding of artistic freedom to the democratic structure of European societies and to the aims of the European Democracy Shield, while the Shield recognises the freedom of the arts and the protection of artists and cultural institutions as a component of democratic resilience.
Most recently, in June 2026 the European Parliament, the Council of the European Union and the European Commission signed the joint declaration Europe for Culture, Culture for Europe – the first time in EU history that the three institutions have committed jointly to protecting, promoting and supporting culture. Inspired by the Culture Compass, the declaration sets out twelve guiding principles for cultural policy in Europe and recognises the crucial role of culture in shaping European identity, in public dialogue and in social cohesion.
Our project ”From Archive to Arena” works within this frame too, alongside other grassroots initiatives. At a Swedish democracy festival, it offers a reading of Romanian archives tracing how propaganda is built as an institution rather than a message, how images of atrocity become political instruments, how Russian influence operations carry the same logic into the present, and what happens to a society when it removes or recruits its artists and intellectuals.
The knowledge and feedback gathered in Frihamnsdagarna is recorded and multiplied with open access dissemination, for a large range of audiences, being also reworked (animated techniques) for young audiences. In Lund and Malmo the team meets researchers working on conspiracy theories, information infrastructures and the politics of truth. These meetings extend Narrative Bridge, the network the organisation has been building with Danish and Swedish partners since 2024, connecting Eastern European and Nordic researchers working on the same problem from different angles.
The project also marks the first international presentation in the Nordic countries of the PostModernism Museum’s programme DARE – Documentation, Archiving, Re-evaluation, Exhibition. Active since 2015, DARE researches the visual culture produced in Romania between 1944 and 1989 – political propaganda, socialist architecture and urbanism, public monuments, political repression, women’s artistic heritage – and has resulted in volumes in the ”History Dustbin Collection”, touring exhibitions and fifteen digitised artist archives.
About Frihamnsdagarna 2026
Frihamnsdagarna has been held annually in Gothenburg since 2021 and takes place this year from 27 to 29 August at Bananpiren, in Frihamnen, with free admission. The 2026 edition runs under the theme ”Olika röster – gemensam framtid” (”Different voices – a common future”). The 2025 edition welcomed more than 16,000 visitors, some 2,000 more than the year before. The festival began as a citizens’ initiative in 2021, inspired by Almedalen, and grew with support from the other Nordic democracy festivals — Folkemødet in Denmark and Arendalsuka in Norway.
https://frihamnsdagarna.se/program/formare-culturala/
About the organiser
PostModernism Museum (PMM), founded in 2013, is a non-profit research platform dedicated to contemporary visual culture, running four programmes: research and archiving covering the 1944–1989 period, its own publishing house, professional training, and exhibitions. Its founders have also run the Formare Culturală platform since 2012, an infrastructure for professional training and public debate serving the Romanian cultural sector. Experts from PMM are members of Culture Action Europe and associate members of EIT Culture & Creativity, and work with national partners including the National Cotroceni Museum, the Bucharest Municipality Museum, the Brukenthal National Museum, IICCMER – The Institute for the Investigation of Communist Crimes and the Memory of the Romanian Exile and CNSAS – The National Council for the Study of the Securitate Archives in Romania. Over the past three years the organisation has implemented more than 30 projects reaching over 50,000 participants.
Press contact
Oana Nasui, Project manager, From Archive to Arena Phone: +40 730 040 514 Email: oana.nasui@postmodernism.ro
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This project is co-funded by the Romanian Cultural Institute through the CANTEMIR Programme, which supports cultural projects aimed at international audiences.
The Romanian Cultural Institute is not responsible for the project’s content or how its outcomes are used; these are the sole responsibility of the grant beneficiary.
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