MNAC - The National Museum of Contemporary Art of Bucharest

I was thinking yesterday that my blog is getting too hoarse, as I usually feel like talking about what doesn't seem right to me around here, more than about the positive aspects. You know the say: good news are no news... But anyway, today I feel like writing about nice things, without forcing it (an important rule, as if you must force it, that means those things weren't so nice after all...). So I'll write a little bit on Bucharest cultural life, which I haven't enjoyed, I'm afraid, so much as I would have liked to. But hey, having still a things-to-do list in the place you've been living for a year is definitely a good symptom, considering that, with my ups-and-downs, I did quite a few things last year, if I think about it...

Anyway, let's focus.

Bucharest has a lot of night life, for all tastes and pockets, and a very lively cultural life: life music at bars and clubs (not only concerts, also orchestras playing pop o rock&roll hits, something I like a lot to find when I go to some club here), theatre plays (with around 30 theatres, many of them offering repertoire programmes... My knowledge of Romanian doesn't allow me to take the full advantage of it, although I have done some tries anyway)....

Street walking, I very often findappealing local graffitties and stencils (while buildings keep unrenovated, better that colour spots than brownish and greyish dirty walls), and I have also gone to quite a few interesting cinema festivals and street festivals. The problem with this is sometimes get the time, some other organise the thing (if you don't want to go alone) and sometimes, around here, it's just finding out in time that the activity you want to join is taking place. Here you don't plan business meeting more than too days in advace (well, maybe the Romanian President does), here you don't have to confirm your assistance to events or get any confirmation from your guests (a very stressful fact when you organise a conference, believe me), and here you find out that an expensive and huge street festival is taking place in the middle of the city only when you bump into it. That happened to me with B.Fit in the Street last May, a festival which was such a big and nice surprise to me that I still have some images in my memory (an in the right side of my blog...).

So, as always, I found out just by chance that there was a new installation art exhibition at The National Museum of Contemporary Art of Bucharest (MNAC). This museum only houses temporary expositions, so, although I had visited it some months ago and didn't like it at all, I decided to trust the unknown and include it in an early-springtime walk (yeah, February, 17 degrees). I wanted to give a chance to an exhibition which included a fake exposition on the first inflatable doll, created by the Germans for military use (the "rest of the warrior") during WW2... The whole thing a hoax, a fake exposition.

Well, there were, in fact, three temporary exhibitions, and I loved them all... By the way, just for 5 lei, that is, 1.2 EUR. (I forgot to say before that cultural life is usually cheap around here. Night life too, except when you go "exclusive". I should use some make-up to go exclusive, I'm afraid...).

So if by any chance you feel like surrounding the People's Palace in February, take a break in the ugliest and less centric part of the 45-minute uninteresting walk and get into the museum. On future exhibitions I cannot tell, but the current ones are worth the visit:

22 January-24 March 2009
“RE:akt! Reconstruction, Re-enactment, Re-reporting” www.reakt.org
The world preview of the works realized in the last three years within the platform “RE:akt!” produced by the Slovenian cultural institution Aksioma.

December 17, 2008 - February 28, 2009
Fabien Verschaere, Xmas Party
A comic-like Christmas tale that will appeal both illustration and graffitti lovers.


December 11, 2008 - March 01, 2009
A Forest of Sculptures. The Simon Spierer Collection
An absolutely incredible collection of 20th Century sculptures, one of each, not too much of any... The house of my dreams would have definitely have a forest like this in its gardens (dream, Pereulok, dream, as that's free and harms no one...).

Artists: Constantin BRANCUSI, Julio GONZALES, Hans ARP, Max ERNST, Andre MASSON , Mauro REGGIANI , Henry MOORE, Lucio FONTANA, Alberto GIACOMETTI, Fausto MELOTTI, Germaine RICHIER, Barbara HEPWORTH , Isamu NOGUCHI, Max BILL, Balthasar LOBO, Louise BOURGEOIS, Alicia PENALBA, Kenneth ARMITAGE, CESAR, Joannis AVRAMIDIS, Richard STANKIEWICZ, William TURNBULL, Marta PAN, Anthony CARO, Vassilakis TAKIS, Herbert PETERS, Arnaldo POMODORO, Augustin CARDENAS, Michael CROISSANT, Daniel SPOERRI, Gunther UECKER, Bruno ROMEDA,Valeriano TRUBBIANI, Graham WILLIAMS, Vera ROHM, Jean-Louis PERROT, Laurent DE PURY, Sebastien KITO, Harald FERNAGU, Andy WARHOL

Simon Spierer (1926-2005) was a businessman of Jewish descent, who had an inherently trained eye for art. Born in Italy, he fled at an early age to Switzerland to avoid the fascist persecutions (his mother and sister, who remained in Trieste, were taken to a concentration camp) and subsequently worked in the USA. Spierer made his fortune in the tobacco business and lived in Hamburg and Geneva. He began collecting art in the 1950s. In the 60s, he and his companion, Marie-Louise Jeanneret, opened an art gallery in Champel, close to Geneva. In Boissano, an area between Genoa and San Remo, Italy, they established a center for the arts, a workshop and residency that drew famous artists from all over the world. When Marie-Louise died in 1994, he closed the gallery. It was then, when he dedicated himself to sculptures. A year before he died in 2005, Spierer donated his sculptures collection to the Hessisches landesmuseum in Darmstadt, Germany. To make the collection better known internationally, the museum, which is temporarily closed due to restoration work, decided to organize (in collaboration with the Institute for Cultural Exchange in Tübingen) a touring exhibition. (Source: onculture.eu)