For more than ten years, Anton Roland Laub has been using various photographic and narrative strategies to confront the recent history of his native Romania. Born in Bucharest, where he lived as a child during the final years of Communism, he witnessed the radical transformation of the historic centre of the capital, dramatically destroyed under the blows of Nicolae Ceaușescu’s megalomaniacal folly. As a young teenager, he followed the highly publicised end of the regime and the fall of the dictator – his escape, his mock trial, his execution. Having emigrated to Germany in 2000, Laub continues to observe his country, its inability to confront the unresolved dramas linked to Communism and the events after 1989, as well as its difficult transition to democracy.

Drawing on historical artefacts – city maps, engineering drawings, archive photographs – as well as family documents and photographs taken during regular visits to Romania, Laub travels back in time to unfold three series that blend personal memories, traces gathered from the urban space and critical inventories. Mobile Churches, Last Christmas (of Ceaușescu) and Mineriada thus form a trilogy at the crossroads of satire, analysis and melancholic introspection, driven as much by sarcasm as by the hope for a reconciled society that would finally face its past head-on. Published in three volumes by Kehrer, Laub’s complete trilogy is presented here for the first time on exhibition walls.