The photography exhibition Collectives of Czech artist Roman Franc will open at the National Museum of the Romanian Peasant on November 16.

The exhibition covers a selection of group photos taken by Franc in various countries and cultures starting in 2015, including portraits of the communities of the six Czech villages in the Romanian region of Banat.

The exhibition, organized by the Czech Center, was first shown in Romania in Timișoara.

The portraits of the residents of the six Czech villages in Banat, taken at the beginning of the year for Timișoara’s European Capital of Culture program, add a Romanian chapter to the Collectives series, which has taken the artist all over the world for the past nine years. They are meant to “represent, self-represent, and document the cultural diversity of Banat, and, by extension, of the entire country.”

“Roman Franc photographs smaller or larger groups of people, connected in various ways and convinced to stay in front of the camera for a variety of reasons. The series of group photos of the compatriots in the Romanian Banat are unique in the author’s work since they bring to life snapshots of our cultural and historical memory that we do not normally see. After the fall of Communism, we, the Czech people, have started travelling in Banat and studying the local communities with the obsession of ethnography researchers, seeing them as a particular relic of the past. We are far past that phase, and Roman Franc’s photos show that today we are trying to figure out how we can function as two halves of one piece, conditioned by a common past,” Jiří Pátek, photography curator at Brno’s Moravian Gallery, says of the artist’s work.

Roman Franc was born in 1983 in Brno. He studied at the Masaryk University in Brno, where he gained a master’s in education (2008), followed by one in photography (2015) at the Art Photography Institute at the Silesian University in Opava. He exhibited in Europe, the UK, and the US. His works can be found in the collections of the Fine Arts Museum in Houston, the Zillman Art Museum in Maine, the Modern Art Museum in Rio de Janeiro, among others.

The exhibition can be visited until December 10, from Wednesday to Sunday, between 10:00 and 18:00.

(Photo courtesy of Czech Center)

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