- The Exhibition Women as Enemies of the People
The exhibition Women as Enemies of the People, mounted by the Memorial to the Victims of Communism and to the Resistance, opened in October at the exhibition space of the Sighet Memorial in Bucharest, located at 66 Jean-Louis Calderon Street. Curated by Virginia Ion, the exhibition’s design was crafted by Zeppelin Design.
2021 Architecture Award for the exhibition Women as Enemies of the People
At the Annual Architecture Gala held on 7 December at the Romanian Athenaeum and hosted by the Bucharest Branch of the Order of Architects, the exhibition Women as Enemies of the People was awarded the architecture award in the category of Architecture of Interior Design/Exhibitions, Stands, and Scenography.
Jury comment:
‘[It is] an exhibition that crafts a sequence of powerful, visceral images, exploiting the theme to immerse the viewer in its bleak universe. Through the interplay of sound, images, and lighting, the audience morphs from passive observers to active participants. Even seemingly trivial elements, such as quotes or personal items, are deftly presented and greatly contribute to the atmosphere. The exhibition eloquently augments, in a condensed form, the tragic emotional resonance of its theme. The grim tales of the 16 detained women, the dim lighting, and the indistinct identities depicted as portraits, delicately and ceaselessly moved by simple mechanical structures, heighten the sense of gloom and uncertainty surrounding their fate. In another space, the portraits of 54 women, excerpts from their memoirs, and seemingly mundane personal objects, coupled with statistical data on communist gulag detentions, neither offer a definitive resolution nor a conclusive summary of the depicted universe, yet they serve as a critical examination of an absurd chapter of human history.’
2. The exhibition Black Pentecost: Deportation to the Bărăgan Plain
The exhibition Black Pentecost: Deportation to the Bărăgan Plain was open for public viewing at the Ialomița County Museum from June to August 2021. It was officially opened on 18 June in observance of the 70th anniversary of the deportations to the Bărăgan plain.
3. The online exhibition Romanian Rural Life in the 50s: Images from the Collection of the Civic Academy Foundation – Sighet Memorial
The exhibition Romanian Rural Life in the 50s: Images from the Collection of the Civic Academy Foundation – Sighet Memorial is available at contemporana.ro.
The exhibition showcases over 150 photographs sourced from the România Liberă Newspaper Photo Library Fund of the Sighet Memorial Image Archive. These images depict scenes from the rural world of the 1950s, a period marked by profound societal changes. Captured by photographers who worked for România liberă (Free Romania), one of the official newspapers of the communist regime, the photographs offer a glimpse into only certain facets of the rural world.
Photographs in the communist press often portrayed a selective reality, emphasising ‘socialist-realist’ images crafted by party propaganda rather than depicting the challenges faced by peasants, such as persecution by zealous activists or deportation for dissent. All that was allowed to be publicly shown were images of cheerful women going off to work with pitchforks on their shoulder, wagons adorned with flags en route to silos, collective farms bearing Soviet names (the USSR agricultural model was being promoted as ‘the most advanced in the world’), numerous tractors lined-up, ‘edification’ sessions with party ‘portraits’ on display, and peasants seemingly ‘subscribing’ to initiatives under the watchful eye of activists. However, amid this narrative, the photographer’s lens also captured slices of everyday life, particularly the expressions on the faces of the peasants.
4. The exhibition 70 years since the Deportation to the Bărăgan Plain
From June to December 2021, the Sighet Memorial hosted a photo exhibition dedicated to commemorating the 70th anniversary of the deportation to the Bărăgan plain.
The exhibited photographs, captured between 1951-1956 in Bărăgan, were donated in 2000 by the Association of the Deported to the Bărăgan Plain and are part of the Sighet Memorial’s heritage.
