Consistent with its initial program to scan those themes that seem stringent to our artistic actuality, ARTA tackles now the area of feminisms in the Romanian and Central-East-European visual region, and partially in the Western world. We speak of feminisms in the plural as after the combative and politically engaged feminism of the 1970s, what followed was a more and more diversified and nuanced deployment of a multitude of debates on social, cultural, regional, post-colonial and national issues, carried on within the central topic of gender and sexual politics of the paradigmatic feminism.

In the dossier of Revista ARTA, coordinated by art critic and curator Olivia Nițiș, a first set of texts debates on theoretical aspects of feminist trends in the Anglo-Saxon world, wherefrom feminism has started, and in the Central-Eastern European world where we live. A series of texts follows that recuperate the history of feminist attitudes – not very numerous, but substantial – in the Romanian visual arts of the last twenty years. At last, a final section of the dossier sheds light on recent and alternative r/evolutions to the feminist mainstream, which take into account queer, ecologist and leftist positions of the young generation.

Without being exhaustive, this issue of Revista ARTA intends to give the pulse of a cultural and artistic phenomenon which becomes more and more visible in Romania. After the pioneering issue of Artelier art magazine in 1999/2000 devoted to the same theme, this issue no.11 of Revista ARTA confirms, at 15 years of distance, the vitality of a domain of reflection which, without being central in the local debate of ideas, has contributed a lot to the humanist and aesthetical refinement of our present-day sensitivity and to the integration of Romanian visual production into a large international context.

Magda Carneci, Editor-in-chief