The Bureau of Melodramatic Research (BMR) is a dependent institution founded by Irina Gheorghe and Alina Popa in 2009 to investigate the role of emotions in contemporary politics and the new economy. Interested in the ramified circulation of affect that lies at the core of neoliberal society, the Bureau examines the power of language and emotions through weaving together real and fictional topoi to generate potentiality for subversiveness. BMR investigates the way in which key elements of melodrama are currently at work on the contemporary political scene. Its research into multiple forms of hierarchies, structures and statistics interrogates the circulation of emotional capital and adopts a melodramatic methodology, namely the melo-critique. BMR projects include a self-help guide for public crying, a safety training for the new office work, a cooking show using love and gold as central ingredients, and a weather forecast camouflaged as a melodrama scene in contemporary industrial Romania.
The Bureau's work was shown at the National Museum of Contemporary Art Bucharest; SUPRAINFINIT Gallery (2022), Bucharest; Goethe Institut-Bukarest (2022); Trafó House of Contemporary Arts, Budapest; HOME, Manchester; Pratt Manhattan Gallery, New York; Times Museum, Guangzhou; WING Hong Kong; SAVVY Contemporary, Berlin; Art Encounters Biennial, Timisoara; Skolska 28 Gallery, Prague; bak, Utrecht; Museum Moderner Kunst Vienna; DEPO, Istanbul; Ujazdowsky Castle, Warsaw; messagesalon, Zurich; Center for Visual Introspection, Bucharest; Galeria Posibilă, Bucharest; among others.
