The Romanian Contemporary Art Association, in collaboration with the National Art Museum of Moldova, invites you on Friday, October 20, at 4:00 p.m., to the opening of the PRUT photographic project by the artist Matei Bejenaru, in collaboration with the historian and art critic Alina Șerban and curated by Anastasia Palii.
“Using analog photography or film, Bejenaru focuses on the sculptural-conceptual nature of these media and their indexical dimension, proposing new perspectives for interpreting contemporary realities.
His works create, document, or comment on life situations, which can be assimilated into a conceptual artistic practice through the way he uses experimental documentary film or photo reportage. They analyze the effects of specific economic or technological production processes over a long period, connect with fragments of collective history, and tell us about the transformations undergone by social mentalities in post-communist countries in the last two decades.
The present exhibition is built around witnessing photographic sequences taken by the artist in analog format between 2011 and 2023 as part of an ever-growing documentary image archive that aims to record the profound changes in everyday life in rural areas near the Prut River in Romania. The process of mapping the territory of the Prut River basin, started by Matei Bejenaru in 2011, was generated by his interest in bringing to the fore the specific dynamics and problems of a quasi-invisible world located on the eastern border of Romania and the Union European.
PRUT succeeds in bringing attention to a topic minimized in the local public agenda, which, in Bejenaru’s view, offers an authentic foray into the complexity of the realities experienced by an essential part of the population from the rural environment in Romania. The unique tone of this series — through the particularity of the artistic work process and the adopted aesthetics, that of the photo-painting — is the result of a delicate negotiation of the relationships between the image, temporality, the intrinsically anthropological dimension of the photographic vision and the pictorial quality of the information collected by the camera . ” – excerpt from the introductory text written by art historian Alina Șerban.
The full text can be read here: https://www.arac.ro/wp-content/uploads/2023/10/PRUT-RO-1.pdf.
The exhibition will run until December 3, 2023.
Matei Bejenaru is a visual artist who lives and works in Iasi, where he teaches photography and video art at the “George Enescu” National University of Arts. He was the artistic director of the Peripheral Contemporary Art Biennale in Iasi (1997-2008). He is the director and founding member of the Contemporary Photography Center in Iasi.
In his projects of recent years, through photography, video, and performances, he analyzes how the modes of economic production, technological knowledge, mentalities, and lifestyles of people have changed in post-communist countries in the last three decades.
His experimental choral music project, Songs for a Better Future, was presented at The Drawing Room and Tate Modern in London, Western Front in Vancouver, and Kunstlerhaus Buchsenhausen Innsbruck between November 2010 and July 2011.
Between 2012-2013, he was an associate artist at Kettle’s Yard Art Center in Cambridge, UK. His film Maersk Dubai was presented in 2018 at the Orient exhibition at KIM Riga, BOZAR Brussels, and Bunkier Stuki Krakow.
In 2023, his photographic project Between Worlds was presented in The Multiple Nature of Time exhibition at the Central European House in Bratislava.
