Ion Grigorescu: Body, Camera, Resistance

 

Join us at e-flux Screening Room on Tuesday, May 5, 2026 at 7pm for Ion Grigorescu: Body, Camera, Resistance, a screening and discussion dedicated to the work of Ion Grigorescu, one of the central figures of the Romanian neo-avant-garde. The evening will open with an introductory address by Roxana Marcoci and continue with a program of films and videos by Grigorescu, followed by a conversation with Marcoci, Amy Bryzgel, and Andreiana Mihail, moderated by Lukas Brasiskis. The evening will conclude with Mihail’s documentary Boxing with Myself (2023), an intimate portrait of Grigorescu’s life and work.

Working under Romanian state socialism and often in relative isolation, Grigorescu developed a singular practice across video and film, performance, photography, and painting in which the camera becomes both witness and interlocutor. Frequently staging actions in the privacy of his studio or in peripheral urban and rural spaces, he used his own body as both subject and measure, probing tension, vulnerability, doubling, and self-confrontation while encoding subtle forms of political dissent. Across these works, acts of self-recording become inquiries into perception, sexual difference, family life, mediation, and the unstable status of images and speech under authoritarian rule.

Films

Ion Grigorescu, Balta Albă (1979, 8 minutes)
A portrait of one of Bucharest’s peripheral housing districts, Balta Albă observes apartment blocks, markets, playgrounds, and passing families, turning the everyday city into a study of architecture, routine, and collective life.

Ion Grigorescu, Boxing (1977, 2 minutes)
In this brief, tightly choreographed work, Grigorescu stages a bout with himself, turning self-confrontation into an image of doubling, struggle, and control.

Ion Grigorescu, Male/Female (1976, 13 minutes)
Using mirrors, close framings, and his own body, Male/Female explores nudity, ambiguity, and the unstable legibility of sexual difference, testing the line between self-study and performance.

Ion Grigorescu, Dialogue with President Ceaușescu (1978, 7 minutes)
Grigorescu stages an impossible encounter with the Romanian dictator, playing both interlocutors in a pared-down double performance that transforms private speech into a form of political address.

Ion Grigorescu, Family at Feneris (1978, 15 minutes)
A quiet study of domestic space, Family at Feneris shifts slowly from one figure to another, allowing gesture, attention, and camera movement to organize 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 image into a symmetrical play of motion and reversal, before reality abruptly reasserts itself.

Ion Grigorescu, Sleep (2008, 6 minutes)
Set in a hotel room in Warsaw, Sleep observes the body suspended between rest and immobility, as stillness is repeatedly disturbed by minimal movements that make sleep appear less as withdrawal than as a precarious physical state.

Andreiana Mihail, Boxing with Myself (2023, 76 minutes)
Filmed from within a long-standing professional relationship, Boxing with Myself is less a conventional biography than an intimate portrait of the artist at work. Moving between observation, conversation, and self-reflection, the film follows Grigorescu through questions of aging, memory, morality, and spiritual life, while allowing him to become both subject and commentator on his own biography.

This event is organized in partnership with the Romanian Cultural Institute and presented in collaboration with Gregor Podnar Gallery and Kinotopia. It is part of Echoes and Distortions: Romanian Experimental Film and Video Art, a new series initiated and curated by Andreea Draghicescu that offers an introduction to a major yet still underrecognized history of Romanian experimental moving-image practice.

For more information, contact program@e-flux.com.

Accessibility
– Two flights of stairs lead up to the building’s front entrance at 172 Classon Avenue.
– For elevator access, please RSVP to program@e-flux.com. The building has a freight elevator nearest to 180 Classon Ave (garage door) leading into the e-flux office space. A ramp is available for steps within the space.
– e-flux has an ADA-compliant bathroom with no steps between the event space and this bathroom.