With art spaces across Europe currently showcasing Romanian art and with a bunch of young artists, many of which are based in the city of Cluj-Napoca, are gaining notoriety internationally, C-print had a talk with Daria Dumitrescu, founder and director of Galeria Sabot, about running a gallery anything but conventionally under the keynotes of abstraction, collision and incongruence.
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C-P: You are currently exhibiting Alex Mirutziu with a show titled "Each thought's an instant ruin with a new disease". I read somewhere that Mirutziu has been labeled "l'énfant terrible of his generation". Could you tell us a about this current exhibition and what earns him this label?
D.D: Mirutziu was my first choice for Sabot. A brilliant, flamboyant mind, juggling an overdressed aesthetic and an exquisite imagery. At the beginning of his career, he was oscillating between being critically queer, performing gender, and questioning the power systems and their bearing on ideology, language, and discourse. Not difficult to imagine that the Romanian scene was not prepared to embrace this approach… And I’m wondering if things seem easier now, when Mirutziu pushed his long-term engagement with performance and media critical installations even further: into the Internet of things, high-end technology, post-language, and beyond. His current show is a mise-en-scène based on the artist’s philosophical notations. An artist book elaborating on his object-oriented research will be launched at the exhibition's finissage – compulsory reading for any ‘label designer’ around!