Ion Grigorescu: Body, Camera, Resistance

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,…