MNTRplusC

Mihai Grecu, a Romanian artist based in Paris, presents at MNȚRplusC a three-part video installation exploring post-communist collective memory and its echoes in today’s world of overlapping crises. The first film imagines Nicolae Ceaușescu’s return to 2020 Romania—amid the COVID-19 pandemic—through a deepfake hologram projected in a Transylvanian village. Locals, including former party activists and ordinary citizens, respond with a mix of nostalgia, irony, and unease. Their encounter with the “ghost” of the dictator becomes a reflection on how Romania’s communist past continues to shape its collective identity. The second work, a 3D animation created in 2015, envisions a dystopian North Korea frozen in time and submerged by rising waters. This ghostly cityscape, blending climate anxiety with totalitarian imagery, transforms disaster into a poetic meditation on memory, power, and disappearance. The third and most recent film, produced almost entirely with artificial intelligence, speculates on how Kim Il Sung, North Korea’s leader, might have reacted upon learning of Ceaușescu’s execution in 1989. Combining historical reconstruction and surreal reinterpretation, the film offers a darkly humorous yet unsettling commentary on authoritarian kinship, propaganda, and the emotional codes of political mythmaking. Presented together, the three works form a visual and conceptual dialogue between a haunted past, a collapsing future, and the simulated realities that mediate both. Through deepfake, 3D animation, and AI, Grecu examines how ideology and memory persist—and mutate—within the digital imagination of the present.