Matei Bejenaru (b. 1963)
He’s an artist and founder of Periferic Biennial in Iasi, Romania. Established in 1997 as a performance festival, Periferic transformed into an international artist-run contemporary art biennial defined as a platform for discussions on the historical, socio-political, and cultural contexts of the city. With a group of artists and philosophers from Iasi, Bejenaru founded the Vector Association in 2001, a contemporary art institution that supported the local emerging art scene to become locally and internationally visible. Together with a group of artists and professors he founded in 2015 the Center of Contemporary Photography in Iasi. Between 2011 and 2012 he was a visiting professor at Université du Québec à Montréal (Canada). In his recent artistic projects, he is researching the materiality of the photographic medium and politics of representation in documentaty format. Using the analogue technological platform, he is focussing on photographic process as a witness of the crisis of singularity and artistic commitment. He is teaching photography and video at “George Enescu” Arts University in Iasi.
Find Matei Bejenaru here:
https://www.mateibejenaru.net/
https://www.ancapoterasu.com/artists/matei-bejenaru/
MODELS
The Models project is a series of photos representing plant models found in the collection of the Faculty of Biology at Al.I. Cuza University from Iasi, which were purchased from the German Democratic Republic in the 80s.
The photographs are representations of representations of reality, thus questioning the often documentary function of photographic images. Printed in large formats, varying between 100cm and 240cm, the images contain a significant amount of visual information. Viewed closely, the photos become abstract, taking the viewer on a path of detail vizualization. From afar we see plants and up close textures, shapes, paths and light reflections.
