In the supposedly divergent fields of cinema and contemporary art, the Arad-based interdisciplinary group Kinema Ikon is an unacknowledged point of intersection. Already spanning fifty years of activity and acknowledged in the art world, KI is overlooked in most accounts of our national cinema, despite the centrality of the audiovisual component in their works and its original founding as a cineclub. Given the recent increasing mutability of practices and influences among the domains of installation art, new media and digitally made & distributed filmmaking, the Kinema Ikon group emerges as precursor to, or early exponent of, Romanian essay films. While essay film authors such as Radu Jude and Andrei Ujică have not cited them as influences, one might speculate on their relevance to not-yet-established artists working with moving images. Seeing the development of a local scene for digital experimental filmmaking/expanded cinema and drastically low funding from the National Council of Cinema, the history of KI is far more typical for the possibilities of contemporary filmmaking than pre-’89 state-funded, official cinema.

This study was supported by a grant of the Ministry of Research, Innovation and Digitization, CNCS – UEFISCDI, project number PN-III-P3-3.6-H2020-2020-0035.