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.

(excerpts)

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!

full interview

*Where is the poem*, 2013 [from 'performance for prepared poem and one hand', based on 'Politics' by Graham Foust] and *Weight of sleep as temporary sculpture present in flesh of face 2013*-SIBIU, archival print on paper, 88,9 x 70 cm

OPENING

WORKS AND INSTALLATION VIEW

Each thought's an instant ruin with a new disease

Alex Mirutziu

Friday, November 15th, 7 - 10 pm

Exhibition on view through January 10th, 2014

Sabot - Paintbrush Factory, Cluj-Napoca

“Off-the-wall outcome of the artist’s philosophy-driven research into the art theory and practice, Alex Mirutziu’s second solo show with Sabot is proving again the artist’s appetite for deconstruction and critical dissection. Informed by his ongoing series of Pending Works, the recentBureaucratic Objects are activated by Mirutziu’s rendering of the Reality of Never and its Design.

L’enfant terrible of his generation, Alex Mirutziu dynamited his way into the art world with frantic performances, resistant to monolithic definitions. His work is regarded as provocative and intensely philosophical to deeply entangled and juxtaposed, where closure and heartbreak seem always in need, of an unpalatable and constricted reality of each millisecond, as time itself might be a result of a violent and catastrophic event that needs re-establishment in history. He declares being influenced of writers rather than visual artists, voluntarily exiled himself in his hometown with which he has a love hate relationship masochistically overstated as nomadic existence. His affiliation to classicism is visible when drawing extensively from Adolfo Wildt and Jacob Isaakszoon van Ruisdael, reworking ‘The Jewish Cemetery’ among other romantic works, following a path that only Constable took seriously in 1797. A Romanian artist in his early thirties, Alex Mirutziu goes beyond his fragile frame and apparent shyness to fastidiously perform the unperformable, moments of silence to thoughts that die never looking like art as in his latest series of works called ‘Pending Works’.” - Björn Olsen (independent writer and occasional curator, researcher at University of Manchester)

“I refer to a space in which thought can operate—a nexus of processes, interactions and mediations that are clearly distinguishable as non-linear, non-cumulative, and task-based. The focus is not on what is happening, but on when it is happening. What is expressed neither describes nor represents existing matrixes of recognition, rather reformulates possibilities.

There is an interior design of objects that eludes us at any instant, suggesting that there is more to things than our representations of them and more depth than we are able to see.

My Pending Works never directly encounter one another, but only relate to one another through various translations. Any object is here, once it is here, not sooner, and in order to be here, it needs different levels of translations and mediations. It adapts to the dynamic of translating information through time, but with no claim of definite form, it rather points out to exchanges within its environment. It does so either by itself, or by coexistence with its neighbors.

Here we are, trying to make sense of the object through its own bureaucracy, through its own internal affairs.”

(excerpts from Mirutziu’s essay Pending Works and Bureaucratic Objects, published on the occasion of this exhibition)

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Sabot gallery owner check-points her vision in C-Print

Each thought's an instant ruin with a new disease - solo show at Sabot