STARTING JULY 2019
THEMATIC EXHIBITION AT THE SUȚU PALACE
PEOPLE OF BUCHAREST. OUR CITY AND PORTRAIT
From July 3rd to December 8th, the Bucharest Municipality Museum offers the public a thematic exhibition featuring portrait-images of some of Bucharest’s inhabitants who lived in our city, starting from the 18th century until today.
The human figure is like a personal museum which belongs to the cities we live in. The way we look like during childhood and adulthood, reflects, beyond ontogeny and other cultural factors, the space in which we live in; in other words, our personal museum rearranges its exhibits according to its “visitors” (history and ideologies), but also to its constant endeavors of “redecoration” (the changes of the urban space around us).
Linking vessels of spiritual and physiognomic traits within generations, specific to the professions with a wider reach: the military, the traders-investors, medics, lawyers, teachers. At senescence the entire human expression, especially the face, expresses each one of us, says something about us and our biography.
I started this project during 2011-2012, when I attended a research course on anthropology at the University of Vienna, under the coordination of Prof. Kahl Thede. During that time I worked on the anthropological value of the patrimony of Kunsthistoriches Museum of Vienna and on that occasion I started taking notes on the similarities between human faces portrayed centuries apart. There is a hidden detail of common physiognomy within the professions developed in urban Europe.
I started this project during 2011-2012, when I attended a research course on anthropology at the University of Vienna, under the coordination of Prof. Kahl Thede. During that time I worked on the anthropological value of the patrimony of Kunsthistoriches Museum of Vienna and on that occasion I started taking notes on the similarities between human faces portrayed centuries apart. There is a hidden detail of common physiognomy within the professions developed in urban Europe.
What I mean to say is that a face, the entire look, memorizes throughout time, more or less discretly, certain features based on the criteria of a sculptor, an artist who aims to express something through his creation. Because some signs, traces of events and situations, are actually traces of our own history which must not get lost.
We somehow reach senescence wearing a sort of mask which is not quite a mask, because it doesn’t hide us, but expresses us, it’s like an essential item in a personal museum. This mechanism of safekeeping traces of something that was and no longer is, but deserves being kept and which I called a personal museum, seems to be a natural process.
We somehow reach senescence wearing a sort of mask which is not quite a mask, because it doesn’t hide us, but expresses us, it’s like an essential item in a personal museum. This mechanism of safekeeping traces of something that was and no longer is, but deserves being kept and which I called a personal museum, seems to be a natural process.
The examples above can be objective observations on the fact that urban society keeps a series of common specific particularities, determined by profession and social context. But this only when there are no radical changes coming through to reverse social roles, like in Eastern Europe in 1948.
Using the patrimony of the Bucharest Municipality Museum, the exhibition aims to give a portrait-image of the people of Bucharest who lived in this city from the 18th century until today. We will use the entire variety of objects which keep the memory of a portrait: frescoes, paintings, photographs, lithographs, numismatics, paranumismatics, in order to finally meet with the Bucharest of today, which will complete the panoply of this beautiful story about us, photographing itself so that its memory will be kept for the future generations who will look back at us.
Adrian Majuru