Landscape in a Convex Mirror curated by Mihnea Mircan as part of the 2021 ArtEncounters Biennale at the ISHO Offices, Timișoara, Romania (01.10.2021 - 07.11.2021).

“Benjamin Bannan’s practice explores the tensions between gendered bodies and the architectural environments that reproduce and reinforce norms and prejudices, assumptions, and aggressions: converging notions of shame and anonymity, surveillance and the monument, architectural environments appear as ways of classifying and hierarchizing bodies and their access to public space. Within such a context, Bannan’s reading of Giotto di Bondone’s painting Saint Francis Receiving the Stigmata (1300) re-evaluates a foundational moment in the Western history of pictorial perspective and mines its ominous symbolism. Giotto’s scene, where the saint and Christ-as-seraph are united by light rays which transfer the wounds between bodies, in a sparse landscape demarcated by chapel-like constructions, is disassembled and restaged as a different kind of fiction. As the two figures are removed in the video, a landscape without characters is repeatedly mapped by the movements of the camera and by the mystical rays turned into abstracted lines of perspective, intimacy, and transfer, projecting the perspectival geometry shared by two absent bodies.”

- Mihnea Mircan, Our Other Us, published by ArtEncounters, 2021.

Installation view: Landscape in a Convex Mirror as part of the 4th Art Encounters Biennial, Timișoara, Romania.

All photos by Adrian Câtu.