ANDREEA ILIE MAY THE SUN ALWAYS SHINE ON THE AFTERLIFE OF THE PAST
Less concerned with propaganda at its loudest than with the moment it ceases to be heard, the exhibition follows how political imagery slips into everyday routines: a pin fastened to a shirt, an illustration adorning a magazine, a monument inhabiting a field. Once charged with ideological purpose, these symbols become ordinary, almost invisible, woven into the visual texture of daily existence and, through repetition, into collective imagination itself. By reworking these icons of the past, Andreea Ilie reveals how visual culture endures precisely when and because it appears most natural.
Propaganda in the Soviet Union was, beyond flat posters or distant speeches, a total environment and a state-orchestrated social pedagogy embedded in the objects, spaces and rituals of everyday life. “May the Sun Always Shine” is an exhibition that deconstructs the visual mechanics of this historical machinery, exploring how political symbols migrated from aggressive ideological tools to naturalized elements of the domestic and public landscape.
On a grand scale, monuments, memorials and public mosaics cast revolutionary struggle into permanent, unavoidable points of reference within the urban space, operating as an act of total devotion. This type of iconography offered role models to follow, such as the miner, with an aim to transform the individual from a bourgeois individualist into a collectivist dedicated to the common good. Concurrently, the exhibition tracks these symbols as they shrunk to an intimate scale. The New Woman, for instance, marks a deliberate rupture from domestic and religious pasts, becoming a promise of a system designed to reengineer society. The Soviet apparatus required active mobilization to create the New Soviet Man.
The state activated public spaces through dynamic, communal structures, mobile propaganda trains and central press organs like Pravda to ensure an unequivocal, uniform ideological message reached even the illiterate populations. This targeting also extended directly to the youngest citizens through children’s literature, which stripped away traditional fairy tales and replaced them with heroic narratives of industrialization, electrification and labor. The Space Race expanded propaganda into a cosmic register, where the triumph of the Sputnik was translated directly into daily life. Meanwhile, small-scale objects of political agitation, such as Soviet badges and childhood insignias, are isolated and enlarged, forcing a closer look into the everyday tools of indoctrination.
By extracting these historical symbols from their original environments, studying, reshaping and recontextualizing them, Andreea Ilie’s exhibition invites a critical dialogue on the ability of visual culture to actively shape social reality and consciousness.
May the Sun Always Shine
Andreea Ilie
Opening: 25 June 2026
On View: 25 June – 31 August 2026
MNȚRplusC, Montăriei 3, Bucharest
Andreea Ilie (b. 2001, Romania) is a visual artist whose practice explores the relationship between architecture and the human psyche. Her work investigates the essence of social buildings and communal spaces, emphasizing their role in shaping the modern individual. By understanding societal structures not as isolated forms, but as reflections of prevailing economic conditions and social relations, she seeks to reveal the true purpose of these environments and highlight the importance of collective experiences in contemporary life. Through an interdisciplinary approach that incorporates photography and sculpture, Ilie recontextualizes architectural structures and artifacts, transforming them from remnants of the past into autonomous objects. Her practice deconstructs the tension between form and function, treating historical remains as laboratory samples that analyze interrupted social experiments. By examining how built environments, particularly those influenced by socialist theories, function as instruments of ideological cohesion, she aims to foster unity and meaning in shared environments, countering the sense of alienation often found in modern life. Ultimately, her work interrogates how societies shape their future through the built environment, inviting a reflection on the intersections of architecture, memory and power.
