Lectură performativă cu Alex Mirutziu în cadrul Bienalei Art Encounters 2023

În tradiția parteneriatului dintre Fundația Art Encounters și librăria independentă La Două Bufnițe, vă invităm la o seară de poezie, artă și performance cu ALEX MIRUTZIU. Astfel, spațiul expozițional de la Muzeul Național al Banatului / Castelul Huniade devine scena unei lecturi performative la intersecția dintre literatură și performance.

Înapoi în Pasolini se concentrează pe acțiuni care arată că agentul uman nu mai este punctul în care se îndreaptă existența sau înțelegerea și insistă asupra posteriorității, a nu-mai, a post-ului. Este un experiment de citire și recitire a poezilor lui Pier Paolo Pasolini, precum și de chestionare a spațiului dintre cuvinte, pe care Alex Mirutziu încearcă să-l ocupe cu intervenție și nu cu frustrare.

Născut la Sibiu în 1981, artistul român Alex Mirutziu creează tehnologii de reciprocitate efemeră. Prin filmele, sculpturile și performance-urile sale, artistul se confruntă cu ceea ce este diferit în noi prin acțiuni strategice care produc iluzia participării la viață prin complicarea ordinii. În proiectele sale, premisa este aceea a identității ca problemă și sarcină pe care noi înșine trebuie să o transgresăm, sperând la pace cu prețul unei neliniști constante. Artistul abordează adesea tema dificultății de a muri alături de sondarea degradării, sau a deșirării, înțeleasă ca o responsabilitate a fiecăruia de a transcende o situație psiho-fizică personală.

Evenimentul face parte din seria de lecturi performative organizate de Art Encounters împreună cu Librăria independentă La Două Bufnițe în cadrul celei de-a cincea ediții a Bienalei Art Encounters - My Rhino Is Not a Myth. art science fictions - ce are loc între 19 mai și 16 iulie 2023 și care este dedicată intersecției dintre artă, știință și ficțiuni.

Bienala Art Encounters este organizată de către Fundația Art Encounters, fiind finanțată de Municipiul Timișoara prin Centrul de Proiecte Timișoara și cofinanțată de Ministerul Culturii și AFCN, având ca partener principal Raiffeisen Bank și ca sponsori ISHO, Tazz, MEWI și Dacoart.

Lectură performativă

Înapoi în Pasolini

Vineri, 30 iunie 2023, ora 18:00

Muzeul Național al Banatului / Castelul Huniade, Timișoara

”ART ENCOUNTERS BIENNIAL 2019: STRATEGIC AMBIGUITY OF NEGOTIATION”, a text by Alex Mirutziu for Contemporary Lynx

Similar to the winds in Herta Muller’s novels (Nobel Prize laureate in Literature, born in Nițchidorf, Timisoara) which take place in and around Timisoara, the winds of change metaphorically embraced by Maria Lind and Anca Rujoiu, the two curators of Timisoara Art Encounters Biennial, blow through borders and edges of visibility and invisibility as Europe’s borderlands are in flux from the shores of the Baltic to the Black Sea and from the peaks of the Carpathians to the Caucasus mountains. As an artist myself, participating in the inaugural edition (2015), and as a visitor in the second one two years later, I couldn’t help but notice the changing wind, blowing in its wings. Since its outset the biennial policies have been hellbent on strengthening the local community with stimulating ideas for a more inclusive and more sustainable future. Since 2015 its founder/collector, Ovidiu Sandor, has been fostering an initiative in partnership with Timisoara City Hall and Timis County Directorate of Culture, among other bodies. What follows is my own interpretation of the works of Lawrence Abu Hamdan, Anca Benera and Arnold Estefan, Aslan Gaisumov, Walid Raad and Virginia Lupu.

Anca Benera and Arnold Estefan Virginia Lupu

Lawrence Abu Hamdan

The two appointed curators of 2019 Art Encounters Biennial anchored themselves in these shifting “winds” with particular attention to local crafts, publishing and personal collections or forms of self-management, in an overall manner in slow digestion with Romanian consciousness and the biennial’s main public – the city’s inhabitants. More than thirty locations and outlets across the city contain such “winds” in a city that has been at the forefront of innovation and implementation being the first city in the Habsburg Monarchy with street lighting (1760), and the first European city to be lit by electric street lamps and to have the first public lending library with reading room in the Habsburg Empire. Timisoara is a patchwork of cultures and nationalities and common historical or current complicated regional issues, mirrored in introductory word of the Biennial founder and president Ovidiu Sandor, who places Timisoara Art Encounters at the intersection of an experimental art festival and a contemporary art biennial, engaging in meaningful dialogues with the local context.

Aslan Gaisumov Walid Raad

I will not at all survey the entire biennial, nor prioritise any exhibition, rather I will highlight five artworks which stand firm in their poignancy and acuteness – showcasing unblinking, uncompromising realities and milieus. Visiting the Maria Theresia Bastion, a part of the fortification system built by Timisoara’s Habsburg administration, I was immediately captured by the video contribution of the Beirut based artist Lawrence Abu Hamdan (b.1985 Amman) who’s “Walled/Unwalled”, (2018). A single channel video installation unsettled my understanding of borders and their plasmatic properties. In front of the microphone, walled himself off in radio studios, the artist brings forth a recent American court case, in which a military thermal camera provides evidence, invisible from the exterior, where an individual is growing weed inside the house. In another case the artist goes on demonstrating how muons (elementary penetrating particles) similar to electrons are described as allowing “seeing” through the walls of pyramids and shipping containers alike. In retrospect, during the Cold War, Radio Free Europe showed that the iron curtain was not soundproof either. In the Soviet Bloc, in the 1950s, the most advanced acoustic architecture for radiophonic propaganda was developed in East Berlin. At the same time the GDR invented a new kind of prison architecture where the walls were “weaponised” against the inmates through sound, exporting the model not only to the Eastern Bloc, but also to Egypt, Angola and Syria. Last year on the event of the Korean Summit, South Korea has started taking down the loudspeakers along its border with the North, and says it thinks Pyongyang is doing the same thing.

Lawrence Abu Hamdan, video still from Walled Unwalled, 2018, single channel video installation, 20 minutes and 4 seconds, exhibition view, Maria Therezia Bastion, Art Encounters 2019, courtesy of the artist, photo credit: Adrian Câtu

Kyllo, the hero in one of the stories in Abu Hamdan’s film, arrested and convicted of illegal weed farming ended up at the Supreme Court after ten years of trials. Finally, the “hot walls” of his apartment unveiling Kyllo’s habit of growing weed became a constitutional problem. Was the heat that passed through the wall into the open air outside, public or private property? Here, as the artists states, the internal fabric of the wall becomes a grey zone between that of the public and private, between technologies used by the military abroad and those used by police at home.

We are witnessing a work which is direct and stubborn in factual information. Within narratives there are renderings of pain, suffering and mutilation expressed in sound transmissions, which as the artist states, takes place within confined spaces – most of the times prison cells or torture rooms; sometimes by a plastic pipe hitting a body, where prisoners can’t see a thing but hear everything. Abu Hamdan has done a great job in his quest of superimposing the audible/perceptible with the inaudible/invisible, reminding us that sound can be more powerful than pain.

***

Anca Benera and Arnold Estefan, The Equitable Principle, 2012 – ongoing, video (recording of the performance), wall drawing, variable dimensions, exhibition view, Maria Therezia Bastion, Art Encounters 2019, courtesy of the artist, photo credit: Adrian Câtu

Anca Benera and Arnold Estefan have worked together since 2011 and their multidisciplinary installation “The Equitable Principle” – an ongoing project that takes a look at borders and property, and property at large in a performative restitution of the economic interests over the Snake Island. Located in the Black Sea, the island was toyed with over centuries by the Ottoman Empire, Romania, The Soviet Union and lastly, Ukraine. Following the collapse of the Soviet Union, the Snake Island became the subject of a major territorial dispute resulting in political deadlock between Romania and Ukraine. In 2009 the Hague tribunal decided to give 80% of the disputed terrain to Romania, alongside the rights to its gas and oil reserves.

The backdrop of this settlement urged the two artists to address the Roman ancient law that literary says: “no one can give what they don’t have,” citing out a 0.509 square metre snow block from the ice-covered area of the Black Sea. The size represented the equivalent surface-unit that each Romanian national would have received, had the territory been divided per capita. Likewise, they are planning to bring 0.892 square metre of solid from Snake Island to Bucharest in similar policy.

***

Aslan Gaisumov, People of No Consequence, 2016, video still, exhibition view, Maria Therezia Bastion, Art Encounters 2019, courtesy of the artist, photo credit: Adrian Câtu

In line with the discrepancy between the nations interests and those of the individual, Aslan Gaisumov (born in Chechnya), in his video projection called “People of No Consequence”, a short video from 2016, has created something of a monument to the historical responsibility and courage of his people.  The artist captured the meeting of a number of survivors of Chechen and Ingush deportation by the Soviet Union to Central Asia during the Second World War. Filmed in a single shot and centrally framed, the work has been produced in the tradition of tableau vivant. No one looks at the camera, no one speaks. The survivors are coming together, and it is in this frame that the film is startling. The slowness with which they all take their seats and the probability of sharing similar traumas can blow one away, even though there is no movement of the camera whatsoever, and no dialogue. The act of 119 survivors sitting in silence brings about not a nostalgic and pitiful feeling, but that of immense presence and dignity these people have in facing their own past and future.

***

Walid Raad, Views from outer to inner compartment, 2019, exhibition view, Art Encounters Foundation, Art Encounters 2019, courtesy of the artist, photo credit: Adrian Câtu

The motif of the wall is present once again in one of the works at ISHO House – the seat of Art Encounters Foundation and of the Biennial at large. This old historic house turned into a centre for arts in 2017, and now is the hub and exhibition space of the permanent collections of the Biennial, as well as a meeting point for artists and other cultural workers. It is here that we are torn between what is invisible and what is visible, expanding on the provocation of visual perception of things via graphics, photography and sculpture. Once you enter the exhibition space you are struck by a life-size wallpaper, representing a travesty of space and perspective. Walid Raad, the Lebanese born artist whose oeuvre was shown at Documenta 11 and Venice Biennial,  and who now commutes between NY and Beirut and confronts the viewer in “Views from outer to inner compartment”, presents a silk-like wall print which stands as the entrance into another space, possible via two door frames which invite the viewer to other chambers. Blending calmly with the actual space where it is placed, this work invites one into a masochistic game of wanting to step into the illusion and refraining from it, while at the same time being pulled inexorably in.

In actuality the artist gives a hint on how to interpret his work in a short text which consorts the wallpaper. There we find out that the empty walls seen in the print are possibly a hallucination of an Arab woman, who at the opening of the modern art exhibition (we are not told which modern art museum nor what city) vocally endorses the existence of empty walls despite the masterpieces on show. Her claim that the museum walls are filled with nothing is arguably something to think about when the artist materialises such vision and throws it into the art circuit. Here, Walid Raad returns to the motif of museum walls, something which he has done in numerous past projects. Coming in various scales and shapes, the museum-like walls are constructed while blinking at the Louvre, the Guggenheim, the Whitechapel Gallery and other institutions with which he engages. Accompanying the walls are the stories of those who, for mysterious reasons, cannot enter the institutions, nor find the seemingly full walls to be empty inside, along with museum objects which morph into something else.

***

Virginia Lupu – Molibdomanție – performance, Kunsthalle Bega 2019

Coming to terms with who we are and finding ways to understand the other are the main themes inspiring the work of a Romanian artist Virginia Lupu, whose works are shown at Banat Museum. Quite unique among her fellow Romanian artists, she is an inside player. She has to get into particular entourages and alternative cultures to out thereafter something which is luminous, and at the same time – dark. This time, images of witches are her thing, and particularly the depictions of witch-hunt and witchcraft. The latter is a popular practice in Romania with a long history of stereotypical representation. It stimulates fantasies in literature, cinema and television, it draws attention across mass media from high-ranking politicians, to various celebrities and to the general public. Virginia Lupu’s photographs challenge this representation which gained currency in media and public discourse. Drawing on her own interest in esoteric practices as well as in marginalised communities, Virginia Lupu has been working with a family of witches of Roma origins. Lupu follows them during various rituals at home, outdoors in the nature, and on the street, carving out a performative space for self-representation. She captures the nuances of their world from the transformation of the domestic space into a site of female empowerment; to the adaptation of magic rites to contemporary technology; to the entanglement between the urban landscape and natural environment; to the contrast between the social stigma and their financial independence. In the context of the 2019 Art Encounters Biennial, the selection of photographs focuses on a collective portrayal of female witches and the power and beauty that emanates from a communal practice.

Virginia Lupu is also a part of a massive exhibition at the newly opened Kunsthalle Bega, “Lay me Down Across the Lines” – curated by Valentina Iancu. Here Virginia Lupu performs a kind of a spiritual ritual herself, with the help of a spoon in which hot tin metal placed in water on top of someone’s head can dissipate fear. The aftermath of this cleansing is absolutely magnificent. The metal takes shapes resembling nuclear explosions, snow-like particles or sea creatures. Seeing one’s fear materialised in such a manner is unsettlingly pleasurable, with the risk of being tossed around by strangers and maybe even bought, nevertheless enriching its conceptual potential and nuance.

Concerned with representational fidelity to the world out there, this year’s edition of Art Encounters Biennial is more of a mirror to ourselves, one that needs constant cleaning in hope of freeing us from its imprisonment.

Written by Alex Mirutziu

Edited by Paulina Prońko

Art Encounters - 1st edition kicks off

3–31 October 2015

www.artencounters.ro

Curators: Nathalie Hoyos and Rainald Schumacher

First edition of the Timisoara Art Encounters, to become a regular venue for Romanian art in the international curatorial dialogue.

In October 2015, Timisoara, the city in western Romania in the heart of the historic Banat region and among the Romanian cities in the current competition for European Capital of Culture 2021, will host the first Timisoara Art Encounters. Stretching over the historical center of the city, Timisoara Art Encounters offers multilayered displays at diverse sites that invite visitors to share in the sensual and intellectual experience of contemporary art. It appeals to people of all ages, to visitors both local and international.

This year’s curatorial theme is Appearance and Essence, and with it Timisoara Art Encounters focuses on a not so well-known chapter in the history of European art: the story of Romanian art from the 1960s to the present day. The selected works trace the distinct narrative thread of Romanian art that emerged and evolved in parallel to art in Western Europe. For the first time, visitors have the chance to experience a comprehensive survey of Romanian art of the last 50 years in dialogue with a few international artists.

Participating artists include: Saâdane Afif, Dragos Alexandrescu, Silvia Amancei & Bogdan Armanu, Apparatus 22, Rosa Barba, Marius Bercea, Stefan Bertalan, Matei Bejenaru, Rudolf Bone, Mihut Boscu Kafchin, Geta Bratescu, the Bureau of Melodramatic Research, Andrei Cadere, Mircea Cantor, Marieta Chirulescu, Radu Comsa, Calin Dan, Daniel Djamo, Joakim Eskildsen, Constantin Flondor, Adrian Ghenie, Ion Grigorescu, Mihai Iepure Gorski, Sofia Hultén, Pravdoliub Ivanov, Gabriel Kelemen, Maxim Liulca, Ana Lupas, Dan Maciuca, Alex Mirutziu, Florin Mitroi, Anca Munteanu Rimnic, Ciprian Muresan, Vlad Nanca, Paul Neagu, Ioana Nemes, Tara von Neudorf, Alexandru Niculescu, Mihai Olos, Andrei Pandele, Dan Perjovschi/Balamuc, Lia Perjovschi, Veda Popovici, Stefan Sava, Serban Savu, Sigma, sub:real, Gert and Uwe Tobias, Iulia Toma, Gabriela Vanga, to name but a few.

Nathalie Hoyos and Rainald Schumacher, the two Berlin-based curators, take Romanian art as the starting point for their selection. “We will concentrate the Encounters on artists who have a relationship with Romanian culture and whose art is rooted in its history, be it by place of birth, by language or by some underlying artistic references; artists who live in the country or abroad. As outsiders, we have taken an ‘archeological’ look at the Romanian art scene and have tried to capture its essence. After identifying the uniquely Romanian quality of this art, we bring it to the surface and make it clear to see. Appearance & Essence is the curatorial theme for this edition of Timi?oara Art Encounters. We are not looking to pin down a specific ‘national’ identity, and are instead searching for certain cultural differences and individual nuances in the global discourse.” 

Timisoara Art Encounters takes place across the entire historical city center. A thematic map will connect exhibitions in institutions, public galleries, the Timisoara Art Museum, a former high school and several abandoned buildings. Numerous artistic interventions will be staged in public places. A series of talks featuring international artists, curators and art historians will intensify the open dialogue with the public and the city at large. The educational program developed for Timisoara Art Encounters is aimed at all ages and communicates a concept of art as an open space, where different ideas, opinions and concepts about the world can meet and interact. 

Detailed information on the exhibition sites, educational program and participating artists will be announced on the website. A complete overview will be released by the end of May. Further information available at www.artentcounters.ro.

Timisoara
Timisoara lies at a historic crossroads between the former Ottoman and Habsburg empires, in the center of Banat, a Southern-European region rich in diverse traditions. Over several centuries, the city has been a melting pot for various cultures and religions. Furthermore, in the 1960s and 1970s, the city was an important and vibrant creative center for Romanian contemporary art. In that period, artists from Group 111 or the Sigma Group publicized new artistic concepts which drew international attention. In December 1989, the revolution against the Ceausescu dictatorship started in Timisoara. In the 1990s, the city offered a stage for a series of influential festivals, which gave artists the opportunity to test their newly-won liberty. Timi?oara Art Encounters reflects the historical and cultural legacy of the city. 

Curators
In 2014, curators Nathalie Hoyos and Rainald Schumacher developed a film and video program for Manifesta 10 in St. Petersburg. The curators’ selection was the first major survey of film and video art by contemporary artists, working both in the East and West, from the 1960s until today. The exhibition Fragile Sense of Hope, which they curated in 2014 at me Collectors Room in Berlin, featured highlights from a corporate art collection focusing on contemporary art from Eastern and Southeastern Europe.

*info taken from: http://blog.brooklynartproject.com/2015/06/first-edition-of-timisoara-art-encounters-announced-appearance-essence/

Alex Mirutziu - "Because" installation, 2015

Alex Mirutziu - "Because" installation, 2015

Alex Mirutziu - installation shot, 2015

Alex Mirutziu - installation shot, 2015

Alex Mirutziu - installation shot, 2015

Alex Mirutziu - installation shot, 2015

Alex Mirutziu - installation shot, 2015

Alex Mirutziu - installation shot, 2015

Copyright of photos: Alex Mirutziu