The Museum at the Mall

The Pop Up Museum prepares a number of unconventional exhibitions.

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Ana-Maria Cononovici, 08.03.2021, 13:01

After having displayed, last year, collections from the Museum of the Romanian Railways, the Perfume Museum and the Astronomy Institute of the Romanian Academy, the Pop Up Museum is now preparing the Sun Plaza project, aimed at bringing museums closer to the public, through a series on unconventional exhibitions.

The first exhibition this year has been a photo exhibition, dedicated to how shopping used to be done in the past, starting from stories of craftsmen who initiated trade in the capital Bucharest to the way products were promoted before the advertising industry was created. The exhibition was set up in partnership with the Bucharest Museum. The institution s manager, Adrian Majuru, tells us more about it : ” It is the Sun Plaza Mall that came up with this idea. We answered an invitation to set up an exhibition there, we proposed the concept and the theme and here we are. The exhibition is dedicated to the history of shopping in the past 300 years in Bucharest and this historical space. We tried to emphasise what has preserved from the old shopping habits, what we have lost for good and what is close to being lost in the future, that is the interaction with the seller. In the past, when a customer entered the fabric store, a woman for instance, she picked a colour, a certain fabric texture and had a conversation with the seller, who usually made recommendations depending on what kind of cloths she wanted to make out of the fabrics bought. Then, after 1990, the interaction with the seller was eliminated, shoppers having the opportunity to pick the products by themselves. This practice was taken to another level after 2000s, when universal stores, called Malls gained ground. These malls, have existed, under a different name, since the 19th century in the Western world. Bucharest also had a franchise store, La Fayette, the former Victoria Store, starting 1948.”

Online shopping is the present and future of commerce, the way of picking the products also depending on how long delivery takes. Adrian Majuru tells us more about the Bucharest Museum, now present at the Mall :“It is a look to the past, from the 18th century to the end 1980s, with store interiors, buyers and sellers and many store profiles, from bookshops, furniture stores and grocery stores. These are things that can no longer be found today in a commercial centre, because the universal store has it all. “

The Pop Up Museum tells a lot about shopping habits in Bucharest. Adrian Majuru : “Image and text are essential in an exhibition because they cannot be separated. Exhibitions have also been present in unconventional venues lately. We have been present in malls and we plan to display exhibits at the Otopeni Airport, in a secure departure zone. We will continue collaboration with Art Safari, with informal spaces for bigger projects. We also want to stage exhibitions in schools, on education-related themes.“

The Pop Up Museum will host another three museums this year. Access to the exhibitions staged between February and July 2021 are free of charge. Between May 10 and 23rd the Pop Up Museum unconventional exhibitions continue with the story of the telecommunication equipment Romanians have been using for over 100 years. Visitors can rediscover phones and radios from the time of our grandparents and also telecommunication equipment used during WW2, a contribution of the Telecommunication Museum.

Another exhibition will take us to the world of Romanian aviation — planes, flight simulators, anti-air artillery. The copies of some planes made by pioneers of the Romanian aviation, objects and documents that belonged to engineer Aurel Vlaicu, uniforms, radio-location technique and many other items, usually exhibited at the Museum of Aviation, can now be seen as part of the exhibition at the Mall.