The Kulturama Festival in Hildesheim shows “Bucharest – fragments in a box” and “3 times east”, two art works that undertake to examine present-day life in Romania.

“We live in parallel times, in the 1950s and in the present,” says the Romanian artist Lia Peryovshi about the contradictions of her home country eighteen years after the fall of communism: a country where horse carriages and socialist-era edifices and pre-fabricated houses co-exist with powerful sports cars and postmodern glass architecture on the boulevards of Bucharest.

In “3 times east”, Trixi Szabo and Nico Massow engage in a dialogue with both the young and the old generation. In a video installation and a book, an index is created which oscillates between “oral history” and private life scripts.

Realized by Greta Hoheisel and Norbert Lang, “Bucharest – fragments in a box” is a multimedia travelling exhibition, which uses photography and sound to sketch a portrait of the city of Bucharest. Visitors can view unpeopled photographs in three “peep boxes” and listen on headphones to sound recordings that tell of life in the city: from rush-hour traffic noises to idyllic rural sounds in the city’s gardens and backyards. The highly entertaining “peep box” (zograscope) became a very popular medium to disseminate information in the late 18th century; by transporting it to the digital present, the artists generate a contemporary portrait of the city.