Hidden Galleries

In March 2019, the Hidden Galleries project launched its Digital Archive of materials from the Secret Police Archives in Eastern Europe. Funded by the European Research Council and based in the Study of Religions Department, Hidden Galleries (ERC project no. 677355) 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 Digital Archive forms one of the main outputs of this four-year project, which focusses on the creative practices and visual materials produced by and about religious groups that formed the religious underground during periods of totalitarian rule. Featuring rarely seen and difficult to locate materials, the Digital Archive is designed to encourage comparative, cross-cultural research on creative responses to repression in the twentieth century as well as serving to reconnect religious communities with aspects of their lost cultural and sacred patrimony. The collection not only features photographs, icons, brochures, drawings, letters hymns and diaries confiscated from banned religious communities but also secret police representations of the religious underground in the form of photographs, maps, illustrations and network schemes designed to incriminate and visualise the hidden and secretive enemies of the state.

The Digital Archive, which will continue to expand as the project progresses, it currently contains materials from Hungary, Romania, Moldova and Ukraine collected and curated by James Kapaló, the Principal Investigator, and a team of postdoctoral and PhD researchers, Kinga Povedák, Ágnes Hesz, Anca Șincan, Tatiana Vagramenko (IRC postdoctoral researcher), Iuliana Cindrea and Dumitru Lisnic.

In the final stage of the project in Spring 2020, an exhibition will be staged in UCC Library featuring the stories and images from the Digital Archive curated by Gabriela Nicolescu and James Kapaló.

You can follow the Hidden Galleries project on Facebook and Twitter @hiddengalleriesERC

 

College of Arts, Celtic Studies & Social Sciences

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