The DIAPOZITIV [PHOTO-SLIDE] project explores the limitations and virtues of an already antiquated technology of photographic image reproduction – screening the photographs using a slide carousel.
With this project, Matei Bejenaru approaches photography as a sculptural object: the sound of the carousel, its presence in a given space, the monumental dimension of the images – all of these elements combined, offer the sensorial experience of a haptic gaze.
Despite the seduction these monumental images exert through their particular clarity and their immersive character, DIAPOZITIV does not only pursue the formal qualities of the image, but aims, in the words of Rosalind Krauss, to expose the parameters defining the specificity of the photographic act, the “photographic” itself.
The artist stages a rigorous and, at the same time, poetic exercise of conceptual analysis aiming to thematize both the technology of analog photography (“the device” or “the camera”, in Foucauldian terms), the limitations it exerts on the gaze as a way of sensible experiential knowledge of the world, as well as its specific linguistic elements.
Moreover, DIAPOZITIV represents an exercise in perceptual “unlearning” and a meditation on the knowledge resources provided by an image reproduction technology whose history is confused with Western artistic modernity, in an era dominated by the digital revolution.
The natural question that this sequence of images raises is therefore not what we look at, but how do we look? With thoroughness and rigor, Matei Bejenaru articulates here an analysis laboratory for photography understood both as a phenomenological object and as a “theoretical object”, described by authors such as Mieke Bal or Rosalind Krauss as a discursive form situated in the field of contemporary visual culture alongside other mediums and artistic genres with which it communicates and intersects.
Evoking the vocabulary of the retro-avant-garde, the DIAPOZITIV Project rigorously dissects, as is specific to the language of conceptual art, the elements that make up the camera, it inventories photographic genres, framing and focusing techniques, the chromatic spectrum, montage and geometric abstraction, which follow each other in a false compressed history of analog photography.
The viewer is thus engaged in an event that is equally didactic, poetic and performative, in which the artist manages projection devices and controls the time required to look, to familiarize himself with his own photographic condition.
Beyond its cultural dimension, for Matei Bejenaru the photographic image is also a mystery: in some frames, surreal elements such as the black curtain discovered in the middle of the forest suggest that the exploration of the gaze can also be an exercise in subjectivization.
The above text accompanying the images is an excerpt from a curatorial text signed by Cristian Nae.
Matei Bejenaru (b. 1963)
He is one of the most renowned Romanian artists working with photography, and experimental film. He lives and works in Iași, where he teaches photography and video at the “George Enescu” University. He is a founding member of the Vector Association and director of the Peripheric Contemporary Art Biennale. In his recent projects, through photography, video and performance, he analyzes how modes of economic production, technological knowledge, mentalities and lifestyles of people have changed in post-communist countries in the last three decades. The immigration of Romanian workers to the West was approached in the artistic projects Travel Guide and Maersk Dubai, presented in various international exhibitions such as those at Tate Modern, Level 2 Gallery in London in 2007 or the Taipei Biennale in 2008. 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, Künstlerhaus Büchsenhausen Innsbruck between November 2010 and July 2011. Since 2012, he has been an associate artist at Kettle’s Yard Art Center in Cambridge, UK.