FILM – curatorial project

4Culture, in partnership with WASP Studios, the “George Enescu” National University of Arts and the Center for Contemporary Photography in Iași, is launching on Wednesday 26.09.2018 at Galeria Aparte in Iași, the first exhibition under “FILM – curatorial project”

Matei Bejenaru, the curator of the exhibition, together with Cătălin Soreanu, Lavinia German, Ciprian Ciuclea, Diana Dulgheru, Irina Botea Bucan & Jon Dean and Sorin Vreme, propose an analysis of the status of the film during the accelerated digitization of information as well as the types of narrative that they develops them in relation to the memory of the environment. The moving image stored on a film, magnetic tape or on a hard disk or memory card becomes a dynamic image, having very different characteristics, from the high-tech of the cinematographic industry to the poor image, defined as such by the artist and theorist Hito Steyerl.

The exhibition contains films and video installations, photographs, experimental sound projects, made by Romanian artists who constantly work with the environment and who discuss the artist’s film in relation to classic cinema, the contemporary art gallery and online digital media. Contrary to the situation in the cinema hall, the viewer will be able to walk through the exhibition space, having a mobile and dynamic relationship with the projection screens. Some of the exhibited projects will explore the history of the environment and the ways in which we capture, encode and project visual information, others provoke new interactions of the viewer with filmic devices in the idea of amplifying the visual perception of space.

“Film – curatorial project” is co-financed by AFCN – Administration of the National Cultural Fund.

“Before being a visual spectacle, film is a way of thinking in images (Philippe-Alain Michaud, Sur le film, Editions Macula, Paris, 2016, page 7). The evolution from the desire to dynamically represent the visible through its dematerialization, in classic film, to the analysis of the formal structures of images, as well as their recording and projection in experimental cinema, led to the integration of the film medium in galleries and museums alongside other forms of contemporary art. Here, visual artists invest the film with new valences and meanings thanks to the fusion of the intrinsic properties of the environment, light, duration, movement, with new ones related to physical presence, the apparatus and the projection surface, the beam of light. Thus, the film is not only a representation but also a physical presence in a space through the devices that make its perception possible” – Matei Bejenaru, curator of the exhibition and the project.

The project was conceived in two dimensions: an exhibition, as well as a workshop with young participants from Bucharest and Iasi, entitled “Present Room” and coordinated by the artist and curator Lavinia German, from October 6 to 10, at the WASP Working Art Space and Production. The workshop proposes to explore the camera-time-body relationship, interrogating the characteristics of the video medium, the artistic practices in the field of experimental film and the conceptual methods of dynamic image construction.

The experimental films made during the workshop will be integrated into the exhibition in Bucharest, between October 12-20, 2018, at WASP – Working Art Space and Production, Str. Ion Minulescu 67-93.