Photos from the communist period, taken by Andrei Pandele, will be exhibited at the Sibiu City Hall. Some of them were done “in secret”

The golden age: Yesterday, (today) and tomorrow by Andrei Pandele, a photography exhibition with the intervention of UNA Bucharest students coordinated by Anca Boeriu, curator Uschi Klein and Andreea Sandu arrives at the beginning of April and in Sibiu.

After Bucharest and Timișoara, Andrei Pandele’s photography exhibition, organized by the University of Brighton (UK), the Neo Art Romania Cultural Association and the Galateca Gallery, continues its journey in Sibiu. The project initiated in 2023, on the occasion of the 35th anniversary of the Revolution, will be hosted between April 5-17, 2024, in the space of the Sibiu City Hall, a partner of the event and supported by the Brukenthal National Museum.

The dialogue-exhibition is part of the series of projects Romania – England, a collaboration of the Galateca gallery with the University of Brighton, UK, and proposes to the public a series of works, drawings and engravings made by students from the Graphic Department at UNArte coordinated by Anca Boeriu on over the course of a semester, inspired by family memories but also by information from the public space, an approach initiated during a workshop part of the exhibition in Bucharest, alongside Andrei Pandele’s photographs, which he took in the 1970s and 1980s.

Although the exhibition focuses on Andrei Pandele’s powerful photographs of Bucharest in the 1970s and 1980s, complemented by images from the end of the communist era in Timișoara and Sibiu, this multimedia exhibition takes the form of a “dialogue” to offer a perspective of the young generations, in images and various forms of artistic expression, on an essential subject in the recent history of our country. Some photos of Andrei Pandele were taken secretly during the communist period and shed some light on the daily life of the last two decades of the Ceaușescu regime. Many of these images depict places and buildings in Bucharest that no longer exist, others show very well-known and frequently traveled areas even today, in Timișoara and Sibiu, even iconic.

The curatorial approach proposes, on the one hand, to archive the last decades of communism, but also to decipher them with the help of photographic images, which offer the young generation an opportunity to probe the collective memory, a first step towards personal exploration in an accessible way .

The exhibition is curated in collaboration by Andreea Sandu (Galateca Gallery) and Uschi Klein (University of Brighton, Great Britain).

Andrei Pandele, an architect by profession, he is also a photographer, and his works on the communist period are exhibited in several countries. He graduated from the “Ion Mincu” Institute of Architecture in Bucharest and, from 1968, worked in design institutes, agencies and architecture firms. Between 1998-2001, he was deputy chief architect of the Capital. Although during the communist period he took pictures for sports publications, Pandele became famous after the Revolution, known as the only Romanian photographer who systematically captured images of the Ceaușescu era. The exhibition that brought him recognition took place in 2008 at the National Museum of Contemporary Art and was called “Prohibited Photographs and Personal Images”.

Galateca is one of the most famous multidisciplinary art and design galleries in Romania, a reference space, a platform for the promotion of multimedia projects. Over time, the gallery has organized or hosted numerous contemporary and interdisciplinary art exhibitions by local and international contemporary artists. Equally, the gallery has undertaken programs to promote young artists, art and science, sustainability and collaborative programs and encourage contemporary art production through the development of cultural projects within its own spaces and that exceed its borders.

Organizers: Galateca Gallery, Neo Art Romania Cultural Association, Brighton University (UK)

Partners Brukenthal National Museum, Sibiu City Hall

Media partners: modernism.ro, C’Arte Agency, Propaganda, Radio Romania Cultural Cultural. With the support of Igloo, Zepelin and Revista Arta.

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