Radio România Internațional

Tag: exhibitions

  • The Museum at the Mall

    The Museum at the Mall

    After having displayed, last year, collections from the Museum of the Romanian Railways, the Perfume Museum and the Astronomy Institute of the Romanian Academy, the Pop Up Museum is now preparing the Sun Plaza project, aimed at bringing museums closer to the public, through a series on unconventional exhibitions.


    The first exhibition this year has been a photo exhibition, dedicated to how shopping used to be done in the past, starting from stories of craftsmen who initiated trade in the capital Bucharest to the way products were promoted before the advertising industry was created. The exhibition was set up in partnership with the Bucharest Museum. The institution s manager, Adrian Majuru, tells us more about it : ” It is the Sun Plaza Mall that came up with this idea. We answered an invitation to set up an exhibition there, we proposed the concept and the theme and here we are. The exhibition is dedicated to the history of shopping in the past 300 years in Bucharest and this historical space. We tried to emphasise what has preserved from the old shopping habits, what we have lost for good and what is close to being lost in the future, that is the interaction with the seller. In the past, when a customer entered the fabric store, a woman for instance, she picked a colour, a certain fabric texture and had a conversation with the seller, who usually made recommendations depending on what kind of cloths she wanted to make out of the fabrics bought. Then, after 1990, the interaction with the seller was eliminated, shoppers having the opportunity to pick the products by themselves. This practice was taken to another level after 2000s, when universal stores, called Malls gained ground. These malls, have existed, under a different name, since the 19th century in the Western world. Bucharest also had a franchise store, La Fayette, the former Victoria Store, starting 1948.”



    Online shopping is the present and future of commerce, the way of picking the products also depending on how long delivery takes. Adrian Majuru tells us more about the Bucharest Museum, now present at the Mall :“It is a look to the past, from the 18th century to the end 1980s, with store interiors, buyers and sellers and many store profiles, from bookshops, furniture stores and grocery stores. These are things that can no longer be found today in a commercial centre, because the universal store has it all. “



    The Pop Up Museum tells a lot about shopping habits in Bucharest. Adrian Majuru : “Image and text are essential in an exhibition because they cannot be separated. Exhibitions have also been present in unconventional venues lately. We have been present in malls and we plan to display exhibits at the Otopeni Airport, in a secure departure zone. We will continue collaboration with Art Safari, with informal spaces for bigger projects. We also want to stage exhibitions in schools, on education-related themes.“



    The Pop Up Museum will host another three museums this year. Access to the exhibitions staged between February and July 2021 are free of charge. Between May 10 and 23rd the Pop Up Museum unconventional exhibitions continue with the story of the telecommunication equipment Romanians have been using for over 100 years. Visitors can rediscover phones and radios from the time of our grandparents and also telecommunication equipment used during WW2, a contribution of the Telecommunication Museum.



    Another exhibition will take us to the world of Romanian aviation — planes, flight simulators, anti-air artillery. The copies of some planes made by pioneers of the Romanian aviation, objects and documents that belonged to engineer Aurel Vlaicu, uniforms, radio-location technique and many other items, usually exhibited at the Museum of Aviation, can now be seen as part of the exhibition at the Mall.


  • The Toy Museum

    The Toy Museum

    The National History Museum of Romania (MNIR), in partnership with the Toy Museum Association, has prepared for the winter holidays period a special temporary exhibition which displays games, objects, old childhood photos, things that used to bring joy and smiles in the life and soul of each and every child. Around the 1960s, Romania had eight factories that produced wooden or tin objects, childrens books and toys such as the famous Tehno-Metalica Cooperative in Bucharest, the Oradea Plastics Factory and the Aradeanca Factory in Arad. At the exhibition of the National History Museum of Romania visitors can travel back in time admiring thousands of exhibits made in those factories and not only.



    Engineer Cristian Dumitru, the president of the Toy Museum Association told us more about the exhibition: “The exhibition is in full swing, it is developing and is being completed right here at the National History Museum. It is open as part of the museums regular program, at least until the end of the year people can definitely see this exhibition. The exhibition is based on my own collection, which I started in the 80s. Practically, in the 80s, all the boys, as far as I remember, used to collect something – from stamps to cars, to trains and planes. My brothers and I used to collect almost everything. Thus, we always had a large number of toys in the house, especially boys toys, a collection that we decided, back in the 80s, not only to keep, although we had grown, we were teenagers, but even to enrich it with other toys, from our friends or from bookstores. Gradually, at the end of the 80s we had a fairly large collection for that epoch. We were able to buy even more toys since the market was freer. We tried to collect toys from Romania, toys that brought happiness to many generations of kids. Nowadays, it is quite easy to buy old toys, there are so many facilities such as the Internet and online shopping, but all the toys in this exhibition are practically collected from fairs, from old house attics, from people who no longer need them, so this exhibition is a 100% mirror of the Romanian childhood of the past one hundred years. We had the first exhibitions organized 12 years ago and we were a little disappointed by the childrens reaction, because they could not resonate with such toys. Instead, we were quite delighted with the reaction of the parents or grandparents who saw their childhood toys. The most interesting thing to watch in an exhibition is the child-grandparent and child-parent interaction. The parent or grandparent describes or even shows the kid those childhood toys, and the kid understands that toys did not appear 10 years ago and that dolls were made even 100-150 years ago in about the same form. Kids thus come to understand that a jumping frog toy could be more than 100 years old.”



    We continued to talk to engineer Cristian Dumitru about the much larger collection of the Toy Museum and about how it has been made over the years.



    Cristian Dumitru: “As I have told you, the collection includes toys manufactured in Romania or that could be found in stores from Romania in the past 100 years. Probably the oldest toys date from around 1880-1890, at least those we were able to date, to find on the websites of those respective factories. Some are mechanical toys or even a small steam engine that became the engine for other toys in 1880, when it was manufactured. They are, perhaps, the first electric toys made between 1910-1920 or maybe the first remote control cars made in the 1960s and 1970s. There are many epochs and toys have evolved in the last one hundred years from a simple, static horse filled with straw 100 years ago, to the current toys that include many electronic components. Now it seems that the toy is playing with the kid and not viceversa, and it has many more options than the childs imagination. This may be good or bad, we will see what toys the next generations of kids will have, to realize how toys evolved. About 13 years ago, together with some friends, I even set up an association whose main purpose was to set up a toy museum, and based on this association, we started to have activities across the country. We have organized over 100 exhibitions in the last 12 years in collaboration with the big museums of Romania and we have practically analyzed, all these years, the reaction of the public, of both kids and adults, which was a very good reaction. We have enriched our collections with toys collected from all corners of Romania and the project is still going on. We have started making a catalog of Romanian toys based on my own collections. Unfortunately, the catalogue is a bit delayed due to the pandemic. If in 2019 we had more than 20 exhibitions, this year we have done probably half, and we are still looking for our own location where to showcase the wonderful collection. Because the collection is very large, even if more than 3000 toys, objects and games related to Romanian childhood are exhibited here. The collection includes many more objects, which are now packed and which used to be displayed in travelling exhibitions. We have an exhibition devoted to the old school, which includes thousands of objects, school supplies, we have even school benches and uniforms. Another exhibition deals with boxes and sweets, candy boxes from Romania — I’m taking about over 500 objects, boxes of candies from Romania made between 1900-1980. It is a collection of childrens picture books, comics books. The toy collection was enriched every year with a collection of images of the Romanian childhood. They are representative images of the Romanian childhood from 1900, 1920, up until the 1980s.” (tr. L. Simion)

  • Mariana Gordan: The Story of the Nomad

    Mariana Gordan: The Story of the Nomad

    When she fled Romania in 1979 with a forged passport, Mariana Gordan risked up to thirty years in a communist jail, for the pretext of having befriended imperialist Brits. She still believed that she could have lost her life if she had stayed in Romania. London, however, a city she has been living in for almost 40 years, provided her with peace of mind, and rewarded her creativity. Mariana Gordan has had exhibitions in some of the top galleries there, such as Pitshanger and ACAVA. She was also been granted the contract to make the monumental paintings decorating three London Metro stations: Oxford Circus, Tottenham Court Road, and Finsbury Park Station.



    She also had solo exhibitions in Paris, Venice, Florence, Avignon, Ulm, Berlin, Tokyo, Seattle and Washington. She believes she is a portrait artist, in spite of what she calls a lack of style, academically speaking. As she put it, quote: “I prefer experimenting, trying to forget what I learned in art school, and use what I learned in museums and in everyday life. Art is personal for me, not an exercise in falling in line with trends, fashions or styles, unquote.



    Right before she fled the country, Mariana Gordan failed the entrance exam for the School of Fine Arts. She was told that she was talented, but not talented enough: “My mother was afraid I could ruin my career. She had an intuition that I was an artist, and that I would not accept an alternative, another career. Shortly after I failed the exam, I found with great difficulty a job as a receptionist at a hotel on the Black Sea coast. There I was drawing portraits for tourists, just sketches, without realizing that people would come to boast about them. When the authorities found out, the manager of the hotel presented her own version, claiming I got money for the portraits, because she suspected I was getting money for the drawings and was not sharing it with her. The next step was to be fired, and then arrested, even if no money was found on me. The British tourists I drew the portraits for got involved, telling them I was fired for no reason, and signed a petition, specifying that I never spoke ill of Romania, and that I was unjustly fired. More than that, as I found out later, these Brits happened to be activists, and they went to gather signatures on my behalf from other tourists. This stirred things up even more, so that in the morning I was arrested for instigating an illegal strike. In addition to that, they said I was conspiring against the Romanian state. These Brits got me a forged passport, and got me out of the country. After I reached England, my escape from the country held the headlines for three months, and the Securitate (the former political police) started threatening me.



    Mariana Gordan wrote her fascinating life story in the book “State Property. My Cold War Memoir, published in 2015 by Charmides Publishing House in Bistrita-Nasaud.



    In this book, Mariana sets aside a good portion of the book to the cultural differences between the Communist Romania of the 1970s and the UK: “The first culture shock was how kind the Brits were. I went to a police precinct to show my forged passport and ask for political asylum. A woman police constable brought me a cup of tea, and I was convinced that the tea was drugged. I could not believe that the police could be so kind, that they would treat you as a human being. It was a world of difference from Romania, where the authorities and the police treated you like scum. When I saw how different the police was there, I was afraid that it was being set up. I could not believe that there can be human beings in a uniform that would treat you so humanely. The second culture shock came shortly after I reached the UK. My first contact there was sculptor Paul Neagu, who told me to go to Durham University, and I signed up for art school. It seemed unbelievable to me, because there are no entrance exams there, I went for an interview and gave them my portfolio. After the interview with the commission, I was admitted with acclaim. I could not believe there could be a country that civilized, having admissions like that. However, things changed after I started classes. I was shocked that most of my colleagues and teachers were leftist. However, they were leftist on the Trotsky model. And that happened in the middle of the Cold War. I was coming from a country full of indoctrination, and here I was, being told by free people that they wanted a world government.



    In 1984, Mariana Gordan registered for the GLC Clement Attlee Portrait Competition public tender. Its purpose was to make a statue portraying Clement Attlee, British PM after WWII. The statue was supposed to be placed in the center of London, in front of the Limehouse Library. Of the five hundred pieces, the jury, headed by Dame Elisabeth Frink, Mariana Gordan’s won. However, the jury changed its position when they found out that the winner was a twenty-five year-old from an eastern country. Mariana was left being the winner in name only, because the money and the project went to someone else. After 1989, Mariana Gordan started holding exhibitions in Romania, too. Her paintings and sculptures were exhibited in Bucharest, Targu Mures, Cluj and Bistrita. Her most recent exhibition was put up in March at the Center of Architectural Culture in Bucharest, entitled “Spring Without and Within.



    According to Mariana, “Spring Within refers to spring-cleaning, more to the point referring to new hardwood floors, painted in an abstract expressionist style, lavishly varnished. “Spring Without refers to a collection of small landscapes, 20 by 20 cm, in oil, painted with the sgraffitto technique, consisting of several layers of color laid using the handle of the brush, leaving room for the background color to be seen.

  • Gaudeamus – the only book fair organized by a public radio

    Gaudeamus – the only book fair organized by a public radio

    300 exhibitors, over 700 related events, first-time participants and many surprises are in store for the visitors of the 22nd edition of the Gaudeamus International Book Fair hosted by Bucharest from Wednesday to Sunday. This is one of the most important book fairs in Romania and aboard. Gaudeamus is the only book fair in the world organized by a public radio — Radio Romania. Its main target is to support the Romanian culture through exhibitions devoted to books and education. The 2015 edition takes place under the motto “The most read book fair at the most listened to radio”.



    This year, the guest of honor is the Group of French-Speaking Embassies, Delegations and Institutions in Romania (GADIF), the host of the event being Victor Ieronim Stoichita, a researcher and art history professor who currently lives in Switzerland. For 5 days visitors will have the opportunity to attend book launches, creation workshops, round tables and exhibitions. Of the traditional projects of the Fair one could mention “Books return home”, “Best Olympiad winners”, “The GAUDEMAUS Raffle”, Books and multimedia, the Education Stock Exchange, the “Ion Creanga” Children’s Book Fair, the Gaudeamus Creation Workshop, the mini-exhibition entitled “Lost and found publishers”, the “The School of Yore” exhibition, etc.



    On Sunday, the last day of the fair, the GAUDEAMUS awards will be granted, as every year, to three of the exhibitors. One of the awards will be granted for the “Most wanted book of the fair” and will be offered based on the visitors’ vote. Other awards to be granted on Sunday are the Excellence Award, the Antoaneta Ralian Translation Award, the Education Award and the Miss Reading Award. The “Mircea Santimbreanu” Press Trophy for the radio, TV, news agencies and online sections will be granted to the accredited journalists who will report on the fair.



    (translated by L. Simion)