Queering the Art Collections Museum

Introduction

Traditionally, art museums in Romania, with a little but perhaps insufficient exception at the national museum of contemporary art, actively avoid a critical discussion of methodological aspects of a queer perspective in interpreting, exhibiting, and organizing museum collections, preserving museum’s conservatory approaches in supporting “heteronormative” narratives that consolidate heterosexuality as a norm within social and cultural life. There is a need to investigate what non-normative or queer relations exist around art museum displays and collections, rethinking them through and with (de)colonial and other historical entanglements while not simply dwelling in the past but instead making connections to our present and futures. There are no queering strategy to make their collection more representative of queer people, or better represent gender and identity-related diversity. Attention should be give: queer should not be understood merely as a credible practice for museums that are officially labelled “gay” such as the Schwules Museum* in Berlin. This would be just the old practice of demarcation and segregation. We ask ourselves:

• Is queer curating something missing from the general curating practice, not just about sexuality, but more broadly a social aesthetics through which we might rethink society?
• Are queer artists equally and/or correctly represented in museum collections?
• Are the museums descriptive texts and brochures related to the works in their collections sensitive enough to queer and identity issues?

Funding transparency:

This research has been initiated and made possible through an Individual Mobility 2025-2026 funded by the Creative Europe programme of the European Union and implemented by Goethe-Institute. The initial research was produced with the financial assistance of the European Union. The views expressed herein can in no way be taken to reflect the official opinion of the European Union. Further development of research, such as this particular page, occurred on independent funding sources, mainly own funding.

Queering the museum

Documentation & Research carried out by Lumi Rațiu and Alex Bodea, Bucharest, Art Collections Museum, part of MNAR, Bucharest, August 2026.
The Art Collections Museum showcases artistic interests that prevailed in Romanian society from the early 20th century onward, presenting works from more than 30 art collections in Romania, which were kindly donated to the Museum, over nearly a century, by both collectors and artists, ranging from Romanian (majority of artworks) and European fine and decorative arts to Oriental art.

Positive aspects of the visit:

• The labels are trilingual, Romanian, English and French, and contain information on technique or materials used.
• The works are in a good conservation and restauration state, except for some extra varnish which seemed applied by restorers on oil paintings
• There is a free of charge, welcoming garden to accommodate visitors

Ensaddening findings:

• There is no room or facility provided for parent-with-child.
• The entrance to the temporary exhibition hall is made through the toilet hall.
• There are no references to queer issues-aspects, neither in the museum or the museum bookshop.
• The graphic artworks are displayed on extremely narrow hallways, probably less than 1 m wide, with poor, improper lightning.
• We found a leaflet with a curatorial text, where the page ended in the middle of the sentence, with no continuation whatsoever.
• The structure is extremely intricate and there is no proper guidance, one needs to rely on the custodians at every floor, to understand the exhibition path. The guidance is not coming unasked, so one, as happened in our research case, can miss, for example, the Lapidarium.
• The is a feeling of repetition among collected artworks and the "Petersburg hanging" presentation approach makes the viewing a difficult task.
• Several collections contain anonymous artworks of recent origin (collected from artists contemporary with the collector), for which the lack of proper documentation is inexplicable.

Recommended Queer Guide of the Art Collections Museum, Bucharest

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  Art Collections artworks in Romanian National Museum of Art Collections - Nudes of women, male gaze, photo by (c) Alex Bodea, 2026; Queered role: male gaze, bodies without agency, objectification of women, imbalanced gendered regime of institutional representation, modes of spectatorship; Queered guidance: In the context of a museum with many representations of nude women shaped by the male gaze, the supposedly “neutral” museum gaze may actually be structured by heterosexual masculinity. We ask ourselves whether the women represented are subjects with their own desires and identities, or primarily objects constructed for someone else's visual pleasure. The museum contains countless female nudes but comparatively few male nudes, what does this imbalance tell us about gender and power in art history?

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