A key figure of the 1990s generation, founder of the Periferic Biennale and the Centre  for Contemporary Photography in Iași, Matei Bejenaru lives and works in Iași. His recent  projects investigate the materiality of the photographic medium and the politics of  representation in the format of documentary. Using analogue photography or film, Bejenaru focuses on the sculptural and conceptual nature of these media and their indexical status,  proposing new viewpoints in the interpretation of contemporary realities. His works create,  document or comment on life situations which can be assimilated to a conceptual artistic practice through the manner in which he approaches experimental documentary film or reportage photography. They follow over a long period of time the effects of various economic  or technological production processes, make connections with fragments of collective history  and speak to us about the changes undergone by the social mentalities in post-communist  countries in the last two decades. The current exhibition is constructed around few testimonial photographic tableaux retained by the artist in analogue format between 2011 and 2023 as part of a constantly growing  archive of documentary images that aims to record the profound transformations in the everyday life of the rural areas near the Prut River in Romania. The process of mapping the  territory in the Prut River basin, started by Matei Bejenaru in 2011, was determined by his  interest in bringing to the fore the distinct dynamics and the problems of a quasi-invisible world  located on the eastern border of Romania and the Union European. PRUT succeeds in  spotlighting a topic veiled in the local public agenda which, in Bejenaru’s eye, offers an  authentic foray into the complexity of the realities lived by an important part of the population  in the rural context in Romania. The special tone of this series—due to the particularity of the  creative working process and the adopted aesthetics, that of the tableau-photography—is the    result of a subtle negotiation of the relationships between the image, temporality, the inner anthropological dimension of the photographic vision and the pictorial quality of the  information collected by the camera. Thus, the PRUT project challenges a kind of rudimentary  reading of the rural territory from the perspective of themes such as poverty, migration, labour, habitation and the need to come to terms with the demands of the free market, as well as the  journalistic sensationalism. The insistence shown by the artist in reading certain fragments of daily life, the  seriousness with which he approaches the reality of the small hamlets and villages stringing  along the Romanian side of the river, his wholehearted involvement in acquiring knowledge  about the social transformations occurring in people’s everyday lives, as well as the decency he  shows in his interactions with them, point to the twofold regimen of the project undertaken by  Matei Bejenaru.  On the one hand, PRUT is a personal, internalised foray into a world shaken by the  syncopated modernisation of the last years, by the removal, against the troubled background  of the Romanian post-socialist world, of an entire social class that has remained faithful to its  locus, but has found itself underrepresented, left to find its own forms of adaptation and  instruments of survival. On the other hand, the PRUT project functions like a field research,  with a very thin line separating art from anthropology. PRUT expands the role of photography as an artistic medium through which the artist  interacts with a reality becoming, implicitly, a form of personal notation dedicated to some  subjects Bejenaru encounters during his travels. Thus, his energy is channelled towards  creating a photography that retains as much as possible of the intricacy of the subject, but  which is attentive to the way we gaze it. It is the act of photographing that is important for  Matei Bejenaru, as well the ethics of representation. Photography functions as an interstice, a  bridge between the artist and the world, a link both emotional and temporal, which informs us  about the status of the contemporary rural world, a world that has lost its traditional identity  becoming marginal, peripheral. With Matei Bejenaru, the politics of photography and implicitly his specific way of  gazing underline an engaged content which refuses idealisation of the rural universe which,  instead, locates it inside a collective narrative and culture. The world of the PRUT is not that  of an “abstract humanity,”1 but the world of certain communities whose way of thinking,    1 Allan Sekula, “On the Invention of Photographic Meaning,” in Vicki Goldberg, ed.,  Photography in Print (New Mexico: University of New Mexico Press, 1988), 473.   (re)acting and living reflects a mix of motivations which reveal the uncertain relationship  between the old historical order and the new one. In other words, the rural in which Bejenaru  is interested is one of paradoxes, where the unfinished project of modernity spills over the  present its own fears, unfulfillments, expectations.

The exhibition is conceived by Matei Bejenaru together with art critic Alina Șerban.

The project PRUT is funded by the Department for the Relations with the Republic of Moldova. #DRRMRomania