Starting from some lesser-known historical episodes, the exhibition investigates certain lines of exclusion from the historical and art history discourses in Romania, related to both dark moments of the past and moments of progress. This process raises several questions: which groups, along with their stories, images and perspectives, have been excluded from the still ongoing process of self-imagining of Romania, from ethnic communities to social groups such as the miners? What events from the basements of Romanian history continue to be passed over in silence? Here, the "Tara de Foc" exhibition initiates an examination of the involvement, the proximity, as well as the benefits obtained by the Romanian territories from the European colonial project. Bringing into discussion figures from this less discussed colonial history of Romania, such as that of Iuliu Popper, a major participant in the genocide of the Selk'nam people in Tierra del Fuego, the exhibition will also bring into discussion other chapters of Romania's history: of to the five hundred years of Roma slavery to the colonization of Quadrilateral, to the occupation of Transnistria and to the genocide of Jews and Roma, from the first written history of the first European expedition around the globe, to other explorers and scholars who served the colonial project until the 20th century .

The exhibition also asks what artistic genres, styles, languages, mediums and genealogies have been excluded, often at the expense of complexity, from the dominant art histories used to construct the nation's self-image? Perhaps that of the Transylvanian Orthodox glass icons of the 18th and 19th centuries, many of them made by women artists, in an era when women were generally excluded from the artistic profession, reserved predominantly for men throughout the European continent? Or the history of Transylvanian carpets produced in Muslim countries, collected in Transylvania and represented in Western European paintings that show us the complexity of the exchange circuits of the global colonial economy? Or the hybrid genres of music that are still a controversial topic in Romania today?
These exercises open new horizons both in the Romanian space and beyond it, in a world that, for better or for worse, becomes bigger than the stories we usually tell ourselves about ourselves.