Arhiva de Sunet presents AICI SE VEDE JAZZ, a multimedia exhibition exploring the circulation of jazz in Bucharest before 1990 and contemporary ways of listening to, visualizing, and performing it. Bucharest had jazz before it had spaces to host it — improvised studios, modified frequencies, rehearsals in the dark, audiences who instinctively understood that freedom moves to rhythms beyond those allowed. Curated by Alex Radu, Paul Breazu, and Mihai Lukács, the exhibition reconstructs the musical and social memory of the city, emphasizing the freedom of improvisation in a controlled society.

Rather than displaying conventional archives, the exhibition creates a space where documents, voices, and images are activated live. At its center is the Arhiva de Sunet Studio, a functional installation designed as a radio booth that hosts discussions and performative interventions on the local jazz scene under communism, with guests who experienced, documented, or theorized this history.

Radio becomes a curatorial method: a way to introduce into the exhibition the voices missing from archives, informal memories, tensions, and collaborations between music and the sociopolitical space.

The works in the exhibition engage with the relationships between memory, time, rhythm, gesture, sound experiment, and their perception/representation. From urban routes and polyphonic structures to critical interventions by invited artists, the exhibition functions as a visual jam session — without a single direction or linear history. Participating artists include:

111invers1, Apparatus 22, Justin Baroncea & Cristian Matei, Ion Bârlădeanu, Răzvan Boțiș, Gigi Căciuleanu, Claudiu Cobilanschi, Nicolae Comănescu, Iulian Cristea, Roberta Curcă, Andrei Dinescu, Cosmin Frunțeș, Dimitrie Luca Gora, Dumitru Gorzo, Iosif Kiraly, NOIMA, Oana Maria Pop, Miriam Răducanu, Ramon Sadîc.

AICI SE VEDE JAZZ does not aim to recover a lost world but to set it in motion. The archive becomes a stage, the studio becomes a sonic body, and the visitor becomes a listener within the work. It is a collective exercise in improvisation in dialogue with a musical genre that has continuously interfaced with the local sociocultural field.

The project is realized by Centrul Dialectic, co-produced by /SAC, and co-funded by the National Cultural Fund Administration (AFCN). (The project does not necessarily represent the position of AFCN. AFCN is not responsible for the content of the project or how the program results may be used; these are entirely the responsibility of the funding recipient.)

Arhiva de Sunet is a platform for researching and recovering Romanian sound memory, coordinated by Paul Breazu and Mihai Lukács.

The exhibition can be visited until January 24, 2026. Admission is free.