MNAC Bucharest ― The National Museum of Contemporary Art of Romania

Founded in 2001, the National Museum of Contemporary Art of Romania shaped itself as a living institution dedicated to exhibiting, researching and promoting Romanian contemporary art. Relocated inside the Palace of Parliament within the historically symbolic House of the People since 2004, the museum aims to provide a relevant, stimulating space for exploring contemporary art, to promote intra-communitary dialogue and to place Romania’s contemporary visual culture in an international context. The museum is an institution with ample research, mediation, communication and networking activities focusing on contemporary artistic phenomena and involving a wide audience, which creates a flexible environment for the most diverse manifestations and projects in the Romanian cultural scene. The MNAC Bucharest Collection comprises over 7 000 works from the postwar period, over 90% of which were taken over from the two institutional structures fused into it (the MNAR and the ONDEA, respectively). The ONDEA itself had, in 1990, received the artistic heritage managed during the Communist dictatorship by the Exhibitions Bureau of the Council for Socialist Culture and Education. MNAC Bucharest also holds a remarkable collection of slides and photo negatives, a document record on Romanian visual culture, a collection of art catalogues and publications and an important number of specialised books, all of them managed by the Mihai Oroveanu Centre for Documentation and Research of Visual Culture.