ABSTRACT
This chapter explores contemporary art practices that engage with the post-socialist condition, focusing on how artists from Eastern Europe revisit the material and immaterial remnants of socialism to critique both past ideologies and present neoliberal realities. Through the analysis of works by Armando Lulaj, Uriel Orlow, Irina Botea, and Marta Popivoda, the chapter examines how art can activate memory and affect to challenge dominant historical narratives and generate new imaginaries of the future. Drawing on theoretical concepts such as Walter Benjamin’s ‘now-time’ and Svetlana Boym’s ‘off-modernism,’ it argues that remembering the socialist past is not merely nostalgic but a crucial political act for rethinking the present condition. These art practices confront the unresolved traumas, despair, and lost utopias of state socialism while also critiquing the precarities of neoliberalism. Ultimately, the chapter proposes that the post-socialist condition extends beyond geographical borders, offering a framework for addressing contemporary experiences of inequality, loss, and hope in the global capitalist world.
