The weight of the collective over the individual is also in question. The video works of the Romanian artist Ion Grigorescu are close to delusion and madness. His film Boxing (1977), largely unknown to the public, is a superposition of negatives showing the artist naked, in the process of boxing against himself. An acute illustration of the 'schizophrenia living in Communist Romania’, as claimed by the artist himself. The film is alternately moving and disturbing. Among others, the practice of private gesture that seemingly innocuous and rebellious in nature opened the public space for artistic creation, such as in the micro-actions of the Czech artist Jiří Kovanda in 1970s. The Hungarian artist Tibor Hajas also blurs the boundaries between public and private spheres when scrolling bystanders before a fixed camera in Auto-fashion (1976).
The discourses around the feminine issues and the various feminist attitudes are another major theme. The rise of feminism and women emancipation in the mid-1960s facilitated the debates on women’s issues in the revolutionary Eastern Europe in the 1970s. A “Modern Woman” attitude was popular amongst some avant-garde female figures, such as the Polish sculptor Alina Szapocznikow, who adapted the Nouveau Realisme style in her artistic practices by combining the body and erotica in a humorous way to explore the potentials and constraints of the female body. The former Yugoslav artist Sanja Ivekovic used video as her main artistic practice to expose the objectification of the female body in the 1970s mass media. At the same time, the Polish artist Ewa Partum staged bold feminist actions in the public space.