Have No Doubt of the Omnipotence of a Free People

Have No Doubt of the Omnipotence of a Free People
A research project, publication and exhibition

VOLUME I

Volume One, Have No Doubt of the Omnipotence of a Free People embarks on a critical re-examination of the under-explored relationship between Romania and Zimbabwe from the mid-1960s to the early 1980s, centering on Romania’s role in supporting Zimbabwe’s armed liberation struggle. It is within this shared, though uneven, terrain of struggle and solidarity that the project situates itself—an exhibition and research platform that asks how internationalism under the Cold War produced unexpected alignments between Eastern Europe and the Global Majority. These solidarities were not forged through geographic or cultural proximity, but through shared ideological commitments to anti-colonial liberation, economic self-determination, and the imagination of alternative world orders.

The project unfolds from a foundation of historical research and archival recovery. It brings together photographs, newspaper clippings, and declassified archival documents, alongside first-hand testimonies from Zimbabwean veterans who trained in Romania during the 1970s. These voices—recorded through newly conducted video interviews—restore a human dimension to histories often narrated only through the abstractions of policy and diplomacy. The archival corpus is further expanded by newly commissioned scholarly essays, weaving together multiple registers of knowledge: academic, testimonial, artistic, and curatorial. In doing so, the project refuses the notion of a singular, definitive narrative; instead, it proposes a provisional mapping of a transnational history marked by contradictions, and strategic alliances that remain understudied to this day.

Romania’s involvement in Zimbabwe’s liberation must be understood within the broader framework of its foreign policy during the communist period. Seeking to distance itself from Moscow’s dominance, the Ceaușescu regime pursued a diplomacy of strategic autonomy, cultivating relationships with countries across Africa, Asia, and Latin America. By the mid-1970s, Romania had become one of the principal providers of development aid from Eastern Europe to newly independent states, extending not only financial and industrial assistance, but also ideological and military training. Zimbabwe’s liberation struggle represented a particularly decisive case, as Romanian support played a concrete role in the eventual dissolution of the Rhodesian regime and the birth of an independent Zimbabwe in 1980. Yet despite its significance, this episode has remained largely absent from mainstream scholarship and historical discourse—until now.

At the center of Have No Doubt of the Omnipotence of a Free People lies a generational dialogue between artists working during the 1960s–1980s and their contemporary counterparts in Romania and Zimbabwe. Their practices—ranging across painting, sculpture, film, performance, installation, and archival reconstruction—do not illustrate history in a didactic sense. Rather, they open a space for grappling with the ways history is remembered, repressed, or reactivated across time. The juxtaposition of historical and contemporary voices creates a polyphonic narrative in which ideological fervor, cultural production, and lived experience reverberate against one another, asking what remains of socialist internationalism in today’s global cultural and political landscape.

By initiating this dialogue, the exhibition probes the cultural afterlives of political solidarity. It considers how artistic vocabularies both reflected and contested state narratives, how cultural production served as both propaganda and critique, and how contemporary artists are re-engaging with these legacies from the vantage point of the present. For many, this means challenging inherited geopolitical frames, recovering personal and collective memories occluded by official histories, and rethinking the entanglements of power, resistance, and identity across regional and temporal divides.

The project insists that the Romania–Zimbabwe connection of the 1970s offers more than a bilateral story. It serves as a bridge for larger conversations about the entangled pasts, presents, and futures of both nations, and by extension, about the unfinished histories of decolonization and post-communist transformation. This shared moment of convergence allows Zimbabwean and Romanian artists to enter into dialogue across time, geography, and medium, revealing the multiplicity of perspectives that shape lived experience under the pressures of political ideology and global realignments.

In reactivating this history, the exhibition also challenges the narrow frameworks that have long constrained both Romanian and Zimbabwean art. Romanian art has too often been circumscribed within narrowly Eastern European or Western narratives. Zimbabwean art, like much African art, has been subjected to a different but equally reductive fate—either absorbed into homogenizing “African” framings or co-opted into colonialist categories that flatten its diversity. By foregrounding their interwoven trajectories, this project seeks to destabilize such categories, insisting that Romanian and Zimbabwean art must be seen in their full capacities: self-determined, interconnected, and resonant far beyond the boundaries of national or continental framings.

The Bucharest chapter of the exhibition will bring together a significant body of historical works created in 1970s Romania and Zimbabwe, positioned alongside contemporary works that address memory, postcolonial legacies, and the politics of representation. The curatorial framework emphasizes generational exchange, crossing geographies and mediums to articulate a shared critical approach to historical rupture and cultural continuity. This architecture of juxtaposition highlights both the convergences and the divergences in artistic strategies, underscoring how art can be a site where political solidarities are negotiated, remembered, and reimagined.

This project emerges within a broader institutional and intellectual context in which post-communist and post-colonial histories are increasingly being re-examined in parallel. Across the cultural field, a long-overdue effort is underway to acknowledge the legacies, significance, and brilliance of artists from Africa and the wider Global Majority—figures too long marginalized by an art history that has remained narrowly Western in its focus. These gestures work to recover what has been a profound loss: the stories, innovations, and mastery of artists whose contributions have unfolded beyond the Western echo chamber. They signal the beginning of a wider opening, an invitation to reimagine the canon as a truly global and interconnected field.

In this context, the inclusion of a Romania-centered narrative offers another dimension to this rebalancing. By illuminating a Cold War history of active engagement with the Global Majority, it allows us to see how Eastern Europe, with its own post-communist wounds, is deeply entwined with these larger conversations of solidarity and decolonization. The exhibition does not simply reframe East and West or North and South; rather, it gestures toward non-aligned ways of being in relation—reminding us of networks, solidarities, and power structures that were once imagined and can be imagined again, beyond the enduring shadow of colonial and imperial frameworks.

A comprehensive publication will accompany Have No Doubt of the Omnipotence of a Free People, featuring newly commissioned essays by Tapfuma Gutsa, Chiedza Pasipanodya, Iolanda Vasile, Ovidiu Tichindeleanu, Tinashe Mushakavanhu, Emanuel Copilaș, and Wanda Mihuleac. These texts extend the scope of the exhibition, offering intellectual and artistic reflections that expand upon the visual and archival material.

Curated by Raphael Guilbert and organized by Catinca Tabacaru Gallery, with the support of the are made possible through a multi-year grant from the Administration of the National Cultural Fund (AFCN) in Romania, and is grateful for the generous insight of a team of international curators and scholars including Alicia Knock (Curator, Centre Pompidou, Paris), Raphael Chikukwa (Director, National Gallery of Zimbabwe, Harare), and Iolanda Vasile (Romanian independent researcher, postcolonial studies). Together, this constellation of voices and institutions marks the beginning of a multi-year initiative—one that seeks not only to recover overlooked histories, but to create new spaces for artistic and intellectual exchange across time, geography, and ideology.