In the last decade, critical performative art has taken a distinct turn: The academic seriousness of the 1990s has been dismissed in favor of a multiplicity of event forms, temporary interventions, web-based channels of distribution, and the appropriation/adaptation of pre-existing formats. Featuring a choice of post and retro attributes, these ideograms light up in the visual sound of the event and the photos, clips, and sound files reproduced through social media.
In the 1970s, “radical chic” (Tom Wolfe) could still be regarded by social elites as fashionable. In the meantime, a new situation has been created through pop culture strategies of appropriation, excessive use of the iconographic elements of every political movement, repurposing of the logos of major corporations or institutions, and the use of the aesthetics adopted by militant organizations (“terrorist chic”).
Radical changes of meaning, superimpositions, the unorthodox use of symbols of power, subversion, and creative forms of protest all became formative influences on the production of art, particularly that of a younger generation of artists such as Anna Ceeh (Russia) and Iv Toshain (Bulgaria) who hail from the former Soviet sphere of influence. The experience that the world of cultural representation is inconsistent and determined by codes of territorializing power has shaped aesthetic processes, which have as their content the dynamics of transition and the shift of attention to margins and thresholds.
