November 2, 2023–March 31, 2024
The National Museum of Contemporary Art—MNAC Bucharest announces its fall 2023–spring 2024 exhibition season and the launch of the MNAC20bis anniversary year, celebrating the Museum’s presence in the current venue since 29.10.2004 through a special programme of monthly events.
Anniversary
Born at the unexpected intersection of political wilfulness and cultural frenzy, MNAC Bucharest is a living, adapting, versatile and unpredictable organism. Barely out of its teens, MNAC is continuously negotiating a place among the local and international cultural institutions, not only with a lack of complexes typical to the young age, but also with the critical spirit necessary for dealing with a complicated heritage. MNAC Bucharest has all the makings of a 21st-century landmark, while it carries the fascinating yet overwhelming baggage of the communist period, making it an ideal place to understand who we are, where we come from, where we are headed. A Prince Charming of the absurd, MNAC Bucharest holds two birth dates. In 2021 the museum celebrated the 20th anniversary of its creation on paper. The year 2024 marks another anniversary: 20 years of physical existence in the House of the People.
Exhibitions
In time for the twentieth anniversary, the two displays of the museum’s collection conjointly bridge the history of the museum’s formation and its complex heritage, while also reflecting the Romanian visual production of the last decades and the recent strategies of institution building. Leviathan, the permanent display of the art storages is both the open stage and programme aimed at looking back to the various mechanisms that governed the birth of the collection in its first phases. PULS 21 is a selection from the 2020 and 2022 Art Acquisitions, revealing a prospective attitude in the museum’s curatorial reflection.
As part of MNAC’s mission of fostering international dialogue, curator Anca Mihuleț presents Chronicles of the Future Superheroes. Second Edition, that brings together 14 artists—with discourses resulting from hybrid practices, bordering visuality, architecture, choreography, engineering, performance and writing—into a dialogue of two particular geographical and cultural realms, Southeast Europe and Southeast Asia, on the passage of time and ageing, the future of the planet, the relationship with the unworldly or the balance between the local and the global: Hyunjin Bek (South Korea), Adriana Chiruța (Romania), Baptiste Debombourg (France), Oana Hodade & Alexandra Pâzgu (Romania/Austria), Heecheon Kim (South Korea), Fabio Lattanzi Antinori (Italy-UK), Saem Lee (South Korea), Lawrence Lek (UK), Dalibor Martinis (Hungary), Adina Mocanu (Romania/Germany), Maria Pop Timaru (Romania), Larisa Sitar (Romania), Dimitar Solakov (BG), Stardust Architects (Romania). The Exhibition is supported by the Ministry of Culture, Sports and Tourism of the Republic of Korea, Korea Arts Management Service (KAMS) / Fund for Korean Art Abroad (FKAA), the Italian Institute of Culture Bucharest, LG Electronics Romania.
Three solo presentations are part of this season: The Loss of Innocence, a retrospective exhibition of late avant-garde painter Alma Redlinger, part of MNAC’s programme of recovering personalities from the recent history of Romanian arts. Victoria Zidaru’s The First Day, curated by Ruxandra Demetrescu, is a site-specific installation of textile and vegetal materials relying on visual-haptic and olfactory stimuli. And, in the frame of the Marble Hall programme curated by Călin Dan, Eugen Raportoru signs Heritage, a site-specific installation drawing from the building’s historical burden and created in partnership with Roma Education Fund Romania.
The Auditorium hosts the exhibition of Iași-based artist Felix Aftene, Dali’s Moustache and Other Colours, a multidisciplinary collaboration with writer Lucian Dan Teodorovici and Andrei Cozlac (video), Paul Pintilie (music), Gabi Dimitriu (NFT). In the Dialogue space, the museum maintains its open platform dedicated to art students and alumni.
MNAC Sponsors: AQUA Carpatica, BRD Groupe Société Générale, Greentek & DARA Lighting, Crama Oprișor, LG Electronics România, Policolor România, Grup Transilvae, Molotow, ProfiArt, UniCredit Bank, Vitamin Aqua & Pop Cola
Info and press: info [at] mnac.ro
