Until November 9, 2025, Gallery 2/3 in Bucharest presents Videographies, a group exhibition curated by Cristian Nae, showcasing contemporary video practices by both established and emerging Romanian artists: Dan Acostioaiei, Leonard Alecu, Matei Bejenaru, Ciprian Ciuclea, and Irina Botea Butan & JonDean. The exhibition explores how moving images can simultaneously function as document, artistic intervention, and a medium for critical reflection—opening up a dialogue around memory, identity, space, and perception within a continuously shifting social context.
“Videographies is a curatorial research project that explores the tension between the photographic image—static, articulated through its own artistic language and through strategies of juxtaposition, concatenation, and multiplication of meaning—and the moving image, traditionally privileged as a tool for narrative construction. If, historically, the genesis of cinema relies on chronophotographic techniques, what happens when photography and dynamic imagery translate into one another, collide, deconstruct, and recompose each other, amplifying their rhythms, ontological regimes, and modes of seeing and understanding the world?
The exhibition space becomes a theoretical laboratory where the works are liberated from the seductive potential cultivated by the cultural consumption frameworks of the post-Hollywood spectacle industry. Installed as spatial arrangements, they function as agents of transmedia experiments that not only extend, incorporate, or critically analyze photographic images, but also act as autonomous, unstable semiotic agents engaged in a meta-exercise reflecting on the tension and reciprocal contamination between the two media.
Thus, the exhibition opens a field of investigation into the documentary image, into the politics and poetics of technologically mediated vision, and into the ways collective memory is constructed and assigned multiple meanings. The curatorial selection deliberately raises a series of questions, without intending to offer definitive answers: How does a photographic fragment, extracted from an image flow, alter the order of reading and the viewer’s attention? How is temporal duration respatialized in this context, and what aesthetic effects emerge from this? How does cinematic language transform the impact of the photographic image—its capacity to bring things into presence and its functions, among which the exhibited works notably evoke the role of witness, echo, companion, or fellow traveler? And finally, how do Deleuzian typologies of the image—affection-image, perception-image, time-image, and memory-image—reintegrate and dialogue within the exhibition space in relation to the cinematic image?”
Cristian Nae
The exhibition is part of the “Photography After Photography” program, co-funded by AFCN.
