| Echoes and DistortionsRomanian Experimental Film and Video Art |
| Tuesday May 5, 7 PM at e-flux screening room(72 Classon Ave, Brooklyn, NY 11205, USA) |
Part of the new series Echoes and Distortions: Romanian Experimental Film and Video Art, organized by the Romanian Cultural Institute in partnership with e-flux Screening Room, the screening+talk event introduces American audiences to a vital yet historically underrepresented field: Romanian experimental film and video art. The series begins with a focus on Ion Grigorescu, a central figure of the Romanian neo-avantgarde, whose work emerged under the constraints of the communist regime and remained largely unseen until after 1989.
Working in relative isolation, Grigorescu developed a singular practice across film, performance, and photography, in which the camera becomes both witness and interlocutor. His works—often staged in the privacy of his studio or in peripheral landscapes—use the artist’s own body as primary material, probing states of tension, vulnerability, and self-confrontation while encoding subtle forms of political dissent. Across these moving image works, tightly constructed actions give way to reflections on perception, doubling, and mediation, culminating in staged dialogues that test the limits of representation under authoritarianism.
The evening opens with a keynote address by MoMA curator Roxana Marcoci, titled Ion Grigorescu — Cinema at the Limits of the Self, followed by a screening of eight key works—Balta Albă, Aquatic, Boxing, Male/Female, Dialogue with President Ceaușescu, Family, Start, and Sleep. A panel discussion with Roxana Marcoci, Amy Bryzgel, and Lukas Brasiskis will expand on Grigorescu’s legacy within both Eastern European and global experimental contexts, with Romanian director Andreiana Mihail joining online. The program concludes with the documentary Boxing with Myself (dir. Andreiana Mihail), which offers an intimate portrait of the artist’s life and practice.
Presented in partnership with Gregor Podnar Gallery and Kinotopia, the evening sets the stage for the series as a whole, foregrounding practices shaped by constraint, experimentation, and critical reflection, and tracing how Romanian artists have engaged the moving image as a space of resistance, inquiry, and transformation.
