Kunsthalle Bega invites you to a guided tour of the exhibition PROIECȚIE 02, led by visual artist Matei Bejenaru and curator Cristian Nae, on Saturday, April 13, 2024, starting at 12:00.
PROJECTION 02 formally continues Matei Bejenaru’s longstanding artistic research into the materiality of the photographic medium, its techniques, practices, and documentary policies. Making use of primarily analog technologies of image production, the artist underscores the importance of the photographic process as a witness to societal changes and artistic engagement in a world marked by crises.
The exhibition is conceived as an immersive photographic installation that explores the ways in which the images and their materialities are perceived. Photography, presented through multiple projections, not only as an object but more as a social process, becomes the subject of a conceptual meditation on representation, history and our relationship with space.
The guided tour is aimed at all audiences.
Visitors with disabilities who wish to visit the PROJECTION 02 exhibition and participate in the guided tour organised at Kunsthalle Bega can use the access lift to the first floor of the building.
Matei Bejenaru is a visual artist, founder and artistic director of the Periferic Contemporary Art Biennial in Iasi, organized from 1997 to 2008. In his recent artistic projects, through photography and video, Bejenaru explores the materiality of the photographic medium and the politics of representation in the documentary format. Using the technological platform specific to analogue images, whether static or dynamic, he brings to the fore the photographic process as a witness to the crisis of singularity and artistic engagement. In 2007 he participated in the exhibition The Irresistible Force at Tate Modern London, Level 2 Gallery, in 2008 he participated in the Taipei Biennial, and in 2013 he was a visiting artist at Kettle’s Yard, Cambridge (UK). His photographic project Prut was exhibited in 2018 at Galerie Art & Essai, Rennes (France), and in 2022 the project Modele was presented at Anca Poterașu Gallery (Bucharest). He teaches photography and video art at the National University of Arts “George Enescu” Iași.
Cristian Nae is a curator, art historian, theoretician, and professor at the “George Enescu” National University of Arts in Iasi. His interests lie in the history of art and exhibitions in Central and Eastern Europe, how they relate to global socialism, and the study of transnational and transregional cultural interferences. In 2023, he was a Fulbright Scholar Associate at the University of California, Santa Barbara, and has been the recipient of fellowships and research projects funded by the Erste Foundation, the Getty Foundation, and New Europe College in Bucharest. Nae has published several articles and studies in academic journals such as Third Text, Artmargins, and Studies in Eastern European Cinema, as well as in collective volumes published by Routledge, de Gruyter, and Wiley-Blackwell. He co-edited the publication Romanian Contemporary Art 2010-2020. Rethinking the Image of the World: Projects and Sketches (Hatje Cantz, 2020) and curated Romania’s participation in Venice Biennale (2019).