Hidden Galleries: Clandestine Religion in the Secret Police Archives

A new exhibition “Hidden Galleries: Clandestine Religion in the Secret Police Archives” opens at the Museum of Art in Cluj (Romania) on 21st November 2019. 

The exhibition explores the legacy of secret police operations against religion through a visual cultural lens. Bringing together the work of historians, anthropologists, curators and sound artists, the exhibition invites you to encounter a difficult kind of cultural patrimony of images taken or collected by the secret service police in four different countries: Romania, Hungary, The Republic of Moldova and Ukraine. Sometimes violent or intrusive, at other times personal or with a documentary quality, secret police visual materials had many uses and prompt varied interpretations. What do you see when you look at these images today? Can images escape the categories of the archive? Who should have control over the use of these materials? This exhibition invites you to rethink your relationship to the recent past.

The exhibition will run until 29th December 2019.

This is the first public exhibition of the ERC funded project “Creative Agency and Religious Minorities: ‘Hidden Galleries’ in the Secret Police Archives in Central and Eastern Europe” (hiddengalleries.eu). The Hidden Galleries project concerns the role of religious minorities in the transformation of Central and Eastern Europe societies in the 20th century seen through the prism of the secret police archives in the region. The project re-examines and re-contextualises the holdings of secret police archives in three countries; Romania, the Republic of Moldova and Hungary, with the aim drawing scholarly and public attention to alternative uses and meanings of the archives in relation to the study of minority religions.