Our alumnus Anton Roland Laub’s final project work “Mobile Churches” is now part of the collection of the Bucharest Municipality Museum.

“Mobile Churches” was on view as Solo Exhibition from 13 June – 31 July 2019 at Bucharest Municipality Museum, curated by Sonia Voss as part of Saison France-Roumanie.

In the summer of 2017, the photobook dummy was shortlisted for the Luma Dummy Book Award and was on view at Les Rencontres d’Arles and also at Unseen Amsterdam. In November the photo book “Mobile Churches” was published as a trilingual edition (De/Fr/En) by Kehrer Verlag and launched at Paris Photo. It is available in the libraries at Berkeley University of California, Princeton University, University of Chicago, Columbia University New York City, Yale University New Haven and Getty Research Institute L.A.

In 2018, the photographic series “Mobile Churches” was nominated for the New Discovery Award at the Festival Les Rencontres Internationales de la Photographie, Arles. The work is now part of the Berlin Wall Memorial Collection.

About: Bucharest in the 1980s. Ceaușescu’s “systematization” program is in full swing in the Romanian capital: one-third of the historic center has been wiped out to make way for imposing edifices and wide avenues intended to honor the regime. Despite Ceaușescu’s particularly dogged approach towards sacral buildings, seven churches are spared and undergo a process as incredible as it is absurd: they are lifted and placed on rails then moved and hidden behind housing blocks, while several other sacred places, such as the Polish Synagogue, were masked by socialist panel constructions. Withdrawn from the cityscape, interpolated in the disparate architecture that shapes Bucharest’s urban landscape today, they live secret lives holding unresolved remnants of the past. By combining recent photographs with archival material, “Mobile Churches” is a critical inventory aiming at revealing a lesser-known yet traumatic urban and political story.