In today’s digital world, the image is reduced to algorithmically processed information. The digital screen has already replaced photography, cinema or television as image presentation media in which traces of an external reality can still be detected and analysed. The perceptual experience of the digital screen leads not so much to the construction of a fragmented subjectivity as to the complete evacuation of subjectivity in favour of a programmed visuality. On the other hand, the contemplative encounter with an analogue image enables the viewer to recall personal experiences and critically analyse the temporal inscription of everyday events. This allows for a deeper understanding of how history is built on the surface of the analogue image.
PROJECTION 02 continues the artistic research carried out over the last five years by artist Matei Bejenaru on the language of analogue photography and the photographic technology corresponding to this artistic medium as forms of visual knowledge specific to modernity. Using media archaeology as a method of analytical investigation of the photographic device and the aesthetic experience that the projection of the photographic image facilitates, Matei Bejenaru recovers the aura of the artistic object precisely where Walter Benjamin announced its disappearance. The exhibition project, conceived for Kunsthalle Bega as an immersive photographic installation, recovers the materiality of the diaphanous image and at the same time the phenomenological experience of viewing the photographic image as a form of multiple projections, in which the photographic device – understood not only as an object, but also as a social apparatus – becomes the main subject of a post-conceptual artistic mediation.
The choice to display in Timișoara is not a coincidence. It engages in a conversation with the memory of the space, subtly recalling the project of the Sigma group, Multivision, considered the first multimedia installation in the history of Romanian art. Moreover, it connects with the broader history of visualisation technologies and forms of knowledge specific to the successive attempts at modernisation that took place in the Romanian space over time.
ABOUT THE ARTIST:
Matei Bejenaru is a visual artist, founder and artistic director of the Periferic Contemporary Art Biennial in Iasi 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.
ABOUT THE CURATOR:
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. 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 Venice Biennale (2019).