Ion Grigorescu: Body, Camera, Resistance – Occasions

Join us at e-flux Screening Room on Tuesday, May 5, 2026 at 7pm for Ion Grigorescu: Body, Camera, Resistance, a screening and dialogue devoted to the work of Ion Grigorescu, one of many central figures of the Romanian neo-avant-garde. The night will open with an introductory tackle by Roxana Marcoci and proceed with a program of movies and movies by Grigorescu, adopted by a dialog with Marcoci, Amy Bryzgel, and Andreiana Mihail, moderated by Lukas Brasiskis. The night will conclude with Mihail’s documentary Boxing with Myself (2023), an intimate portrait of Grigorescu’s life and work.

Working below Romanian state socialism and sometimes in relative isolation, Grigorescu developed a singular follow throughout video and movie, efficiency, images, and portray by which the digicam turns into each witness and interlocutor. Frequently staging actions within the privateness of his studio or in peripheral city and rural areas, he used his personal physique as each topic and measure, probing stress, vulnerability, doubling, and self-confrontation whereas encoding refined types of political dissent. Across these works, acts of self-recording develop into inquiries into notion, sexual distinction, household life, mediation, and the unstable standing of photos and speech below authoritarian rule.

Films

Ion Grigorescu, Balta Albă (1979, 8 minutes)
A portrait of one in all Bucharest’s peripheral housing districts, Balta Albă observes condominium blocks, markets, playgrounds, and passing households, turning the on a regular basis metropolis right into a research of structure, routine, and collective life.

Ion Grigorescu, Boxing (1977, 2 minutes)
In this transient, tightly choreographed work, Grigorescu phases a bout with himself, turning self-confrontation into a picture of doubling, battle, and management.

Ion Grigorescu, Male/Female (1976, 13 minutes)
Using mirrors, shut framings, and his personal physique, Male/Female explores nudity, ambiguity, and the unstable legibility of sexual distinction, testing the road between self-study and efficiency.

Ion Grigorescu, Dialogue with President Ceaușescu (1978, 7 minutes)
Grigorescu phases an unimaginable encounter with the Romanian dictator, enjoying each interlocutors in a pared-down double efficiency that transforms non-public speech right into a type of political tackle.

Ion Grigorescu, Family at Feneris (1978, quarter-hour)
A quiet research of home area, Family at Feneris shifts slowly from one determine to a different, permitting gesture, consideration, and digicam motion to prepare a scene of intimacy and restraint.

Ion Grigorescu, Start (2010, 2 minutes)
Beginning as an elementary gesture of entry into cinema, Start rewinds and doubles the picture right into a symmetrical play of movement and reversal, earlier than actuality abruptly reasserts itself.

Ion Grigorescu, Sleep (2008, 6 minutes)
Set in a resort room in Warsaw, Sleep observes the physique suspended between relaxation and immobility, as stillness is repeatedly disturbed by minimal actions that make sleep seem much less as withdrawal than as a precarious bodily state.

Andreiana Mihail, Boxing with Myself (2023, 76 minutes)
Filmed from inside a long-standing skilled relationship, Boxing with Myself is much less a traditional biography than an intimate portrait of the artist at work. Moving between statement, dialog, and self-reflection, the movie follows Grigorescu by means of questions of ageing, reminiscence, morality, and non secular life, whereas permitting him to develop into each topic and commentator on his personal biography.

This occasion is organized in partnership with the Romanian Cultural Institute as a part of Echoes and Distortions: Romanian Experimental Film and Video Art, a brand new sequence initiated and curated by Andreea Draghicescu and arranged and offered in collaboration with Gregor Podnar Gallery and Kinotopia. The sequence presents an introduction to a serious but nonetheless underrecognized historical past of Romanian experimental moving-image follow.

For extra info, contact program@e-flux.com.

Accessibility
– Two flights of stairs lead as much as the constructing’s entrance entrance at 172 Classon Avenue.
– For elevator entry, please RSVP to program@e-flux.com. The constructing has a freight elevator nearest to 180 Classon Ave (storage door) main into the e-flux workplace area. A ramp is accessible for steps inside the area.
– e-flux has an ADA-compliant lavatory with no steps between the occasion area and this lavatory.