In 1957, Roland Barthes stated that in “Western” mythology the USSR would be a world halfway between the Earth and Mars to exemplify that the communist world was considered as foreign as another planet. Similar to Barthes’ literary method in his Mythologies book, curator, filmmaker and artist Xandra Popescu scripted three semi-fictional short stories to introduce major paradigms of her screening program O’ Mystical East and West: the economization of hope in The Pyramid of Hope, cultural industry’s post-communist identity machines in Latin Lovers in a Sea of Slavs and the neurotic recreation of long-established power structures in Nesting Balkanism or Nesting Occidentalism. Through these stories, Popescu reflects on the mutual projections between “Eastern” and “Western” Europe and their effect on societal habits, behaviours and ways of thinking after the fall of the Iron Curtain. In a time in which mythical narratives have become the legitimizing basis for contemporary politics, as art historian Susanne Leeb claims, it seems relevant to identify and understand the ideas that inform the phantom images and mythologies of the “East” and “West” circulating until the present day. This screening program, which provides a prologue to the future project D’EST: A Multi-Curatorial Online Platform for Video Art from the Former “East” and “West,” presents contemporary video artists invested in mimicking and isolating the contours and shapes of these persistent inventions with a special focus on everyday life, pop culture and gender roles before and after 1989/1991.