Gabriela Nicolescu

Supervisors: Roger Sansi-Roca, Frances Pine

PhD Title (Work in progress):

Ethnographic objects and artworks between production and iconoclasm. The case of the Museum of The Romanian Peasant

Research interests

My PhD in Visual Anthropology discusses the politics of display in a museum institution in Bucharest, Romania. I am interested in the social life of the collections inside this museum (acquisition, use and display) as well as in the physical shape that the exhibition takes, from the perspective of a present curatorial crises: to keep or to change the present display as it was done mainly by the artist Horia Bernea in 1990s. My research on the Museum of the Romanian Peasant combines anthropology and history and consequently is historiographical and comparative. It accumulated already a big corpus of information from archives and from interviews with former or present employees regarding three main periods in the history of the display since its inauguration in 1906: The Museum of National Art (1906-1946), The Museum of Popular Art (1953-1978) and The Museum of The Romanian Peasant (1989 – up to the present day). The theoretical part of my research will be complemented also by a practical side. In June 2011 I will organize inside the museum an exhibition called: Big and small. On scale, form and exhibition design.

Selected publications

On Maps, Abused Virgins and Nations. Anti-Communist Memorial Museums in Hungary and Romania, 2008, Linkoping Electronic University Press, http://www.ep.liu.se/ecp/030/004/index.html

Raising the Cross. Exorcising Romania’s Communist Past in Museums, Memorials and Monuments (co-authored) in “Past for the eyes”, ed. Sarkisova, Oksana and Peter Apor. Central European University Press, Budapest, 2007