The National Museum of the Romanian Peasant will hold the opening of the Invisible Museum #5 exhibition on Wednesday, April 19, 2023, at the Irina Nicolau Hall, starting at 6:30 P.M. The theme of the exhibition is Subject, Image, Object. In the past, ethnographic exhibitions mainly focused on significant themes, displaying representative objects chosen to form collections. However, since 1990, the National Museum of the Romanian Peasant has also showcased seemingly minor or difficult-to-approach themes and objects not typically considered valuable, such as those from private collections or damaged items. This shift aims to surprise and engage visitors while also providing valuable material for research in ethnographic or anthropological museums.
The Invisible Museum #5. Subject, Image, Object. will showcase visual essays and events from the past fifteen years, revisiting the Peasant Museum team’s museography experiment in the 1990s. Exhibitions featuring topics such as stitches, fabrics, pots and jugs, laces, and embroideries will be displayed, along with visual essays dedicated to ethnological themes, including Wheat and the Art of Passage, Piua interactive installation, and Burticală.Gh.Ion.Leu.Dolj. The exhibition also includes an anthropological sketch Mărțișor. Show: 25-19.
Different from classical ethnology and museography, these exhibitions explore themes from anthropology, visual arts, history, and literature. They aim to piece together the instrumentality and imagination of the peasant or urban world through subjective archeology, stratigraphies, oral history, iconographic image, ritual, autobiographical or ready-made objects, audio-video installations, and organic matter. The Invisible Museum #5. Subject, Image, Object. is not just a museography anthology but brings back the object without patrimonial status but with real aesthetic and socio-cultural valences.
The Invisible Museum series started in February 2017, as a response to the problematic consolidation site, offering an alternative perspective on museography. The second edition of the Invisible Museum exhibited objects registered with inventory number 111 on the occasion of the 111th anniversary of the museum’s foundation. The third edition focused on the intangible heritage re-visited and re-interpreted through research and artistic projects. Finally, the fourth edition showcased video projections documenting the museum’s beginnings and cultural action projects from the 90s and 2000s.
The exhibition will run from April 19, 2023, to May 16, 2023, at the Irina Nicolau Hall, open from Wednesday to Sunday, between 10:00 a.m. and 6:00 p.m. It will be closed on Mondays and Tuesdays. The entrance ticket prices are 12 lei for adults, 6 lei for pensioners, and 3 lei for pupils, students, holders of the Euro 26 card, and adults with medium or mild disabilities.
