Night of Museums 2023 – special edition Romania and the Republic of Moldova

The 19th edition of the Night of the Museums will take place on Saturday, May 13, and will bring to the public exhibitions, cultural interventions and artistic experiments, screenings, presentations, performances, workshops, street and indoor animations, concerts or interactive tours. This year, for the first time, museums from the Republic of Moldova joined the project, for a joint edition with Romania of the Night of Museums. Thus, the registered museums across the Prut will benefit from promotion and representation alongside those in Romania, within the joint platform noapteamuzeelor.org.

As every year, museums, but also alternative exhibition spaces, will compete to propose surprising programs for all ages. On May 13, until after midnight, visitors are invited to prepare their most comfortable shoes and explore the fascinating collections of the museums or enjoy the artistic interventions and performances proposed by the partner cultural spaces. Hundreds of special events will be organized in museum spaces, in astronomical observatories, in cathedral spaces, churches and synagogues, in theaters, athenaeums, mausoleums, in town halls, in castles, palaces and fortresses, towers and bastions, in libraries, in studios of creation, cultural centers, in schools and universities, in creative urban cutouts, in spaces of science and experimentation, in spaces of historical memory, in pavilions and art galleries, in auction houses and art fairs, in homes for the care of the elderly or in paper mills. The Night of the Museums will be everywhere.

“We are getting ready for an edition full of events, movement and novelties, both in content and also from the geography point of view. We already have 200 events enrolled in the programme, many of them premieres, covering 28 counties in Romania and Bucharest, as well as two districts in Republic of Moldova and Chisinau. Currently, there are 49 attractions on the program map of Bucharest-  28 museums and 21 cultural entities and creative studios. Across the country, 130 museums and memorial houses, but also 21 other organizations in 65 localities have registered so far. There will all be on the joint platform Republic of Moldova-Romania, noapteamuzeelor.org, which will be updated soon”, said Dragoș Neamu, coordinator of the International Relations and Cultural Projects of the National Network of Museums in Romania.

The special guest of this edition is War Childhood Museum, the famous museum in Sarajevo dedicated to the memory of children who went through a war experience. These fragile histories are exposed to the public through objects, video testimonies and fragments of oral history, brought together in the only museum in the world dedicated to childhood affected by war. For the exhibition in Bucharest, which will be inaugurated at the National Museum of the Romanian Peasant on May 12, the curators have included stories and objects of children from Ukraine, Syria, Afghanistan, Bosnia, Yemen, Iraq, including Ukrainian refugee children in Romania. War Childhood Museum is one of the most appreciated museums of the new wave, a true phenomenon that is exposed to the public, for one month, in Bucharest, through the exhibition LISTEN! / LISTEN!, which should not be missed.

The previous edition, the one with the number 18 of the Night of the Museums, was present in 260 museums and cultural spaces from over 90 localities, which geographically covered 39 counties. In Bucharest, the Night of Museums registered an absolute record of 64 cultural objectives, being the first time in the history of the organization of the event when more than 80% of the points of interest in the city circuit were full of people waiting to enter to enjoy the program offered.