Call for proposals 2018: Re-constructing MNAC

Within the recently inaugurated international residency program, MNAC Bucharest relaunches its annual call for proposals, addressing experts in the visual culture, who are seeking to work in and around the museum for a time frame spanning from 3 to 6 months.

Re-constructing MNAC is a multifaceted research and knowledge production program addressed to international art professionals, which fosters multi-disciplinary perspectives on museological and institutional developments, as well as strategies for (re)framing the museum’s mission within contemporary society and forging new understandings of Romanian art in a regional and international context.

For its second edition, the museum invites international voices to apply their investigative tools on one of the three focus lines embedded within an ongoing institutional reconstruction process. 

The designated research fields are: the museum’s collection, institutional practices and analysis, and the museum’s outreach program.

1. Research theme: R-MNAC Collection
MNAC has been created through hybridization: it inherited the collection and partly the structures of two other institutions, while building through the years its own history. Spanning from the 1920s and up to the 2000s, with its most significant part covering the 70s, 80s and 90s, the collection encompasses a rich corpus of paintings, sculptures, graphic art, decorative arts, photography and new media works. Although programmatically lacking an all-encompassing permanent display, MNAC embarked on the methodologically delicate operation of reworking parts of its collection and discussing ways of both documenting/preserving and presenting its eclectic legacy to the public. 

Objectives: The grantee is invited to define a field study in the museum’s collection and to critically examine it from a regional/international perspective. Identifying thematic strands in an innovative way, proposing unexplored connection lines between works, or offering different readings of official and unofficial or experimental art under Communism are just a few examples of curatorial research possibilities that are encouraged. A team of MNAC specialists will support the residents with their research.

2. Research theme: R-MNAC Analysis 
The position of MNAC Bucharest in its main location in the Palace of the Parliament has generated a complex field of tensions within the various local communities. Although the museum didn’t, until recently, benefit from an objective analysis of its activities, as of 2017 it aims to reverse those processes through an evaluation of the place and role played by the institution in the last 16 years at the national, regional and international levels, as well as its potential for new developments and growth.

Objectives: The grantee is invited to address ways of historically and theoretically framing the museum, by taking into account its specific regional position, the challenges it faces and the potentialities it hides. The result of this complex research effort in the field of institutional theory and practice is meant to explore solutions for future institutional prototyping and redesign. 

A team of MNAC specialists will support the residents with their research. 

3. Research theme: Outreach Program
With the goal of developing new approaches of museum practice in the field of building/engaging new audiences and strengthening the bond with its public, MNAC seeks to be a catalyst for cultural knowledge production that conceives “contemporaneity” as that which is still “at work”, affecting our ways of thinking, seeing and understanding art, as well as the ways of generating new models of interaction.

Within the multi-layered urban fabric of Bucharest and its extremely fragmented social and cultural environment, MNAC set its ambition to expand towards the city and to act both as a binder and a bridge, fortifying its presence in society by directly addressing the needs and aspirations of local communities. Facilitating knowledge transfer and stimulating participation lies at the core of this endeavour. 

Objectives: Researchers are invited to analyse the potential development lines of the museum in relation to its micro or macro social environment and to make a contribution in the fields of cultural education, participation, and/or accessibility and inclusion. 

The grantees should contextually elaborate on a blueprint for an outreaching strategy combining theoretical, investigative and practical aspects in open-ended and process-oriented formats, such as: workshops/ collective actions, lectures, events and participatory art projects fostering social engagement and exchange. 

Outreaching strategies with the potential to evolve into (self-) sustainable programs are most encouraged and preferred.

For general conditions, research resources and further details please access: www.mnac.ro