Some brief texts on my second solo show, Manifest of Flaw, that inaugurated the Sabot Gallery in Cluj on OCTOBER 23 – NOVEMBER 21, 2009.
My work traverses processes that refer to the body when it is at war with itself; addresses issues of self-familiarisation, mediation, and interaction, framed via social processes and ephemeral emergence. I never forget that I use revolution wise instruments embedded with political meaning and transversal power; my body is one of those instruments - my own disposal container where I am comfortable in stepping in and on my own obscenity, and ambiguity, as self destructive volume, as public duration of images, processual, exercising freedom in complex environments.
I intend to make use of the processes of the body almost to a level of rape, to generate distinctions and to create meaning when introduced into new systems of relations. Therefore I deliberately take my own body as the main place of confrontation and communication with my own memory and suffering. I have always learned through disappearances, through leavings and comings-to-be, never conceptualising restrictions - always acting upon them.
My work is a shared provocation of corruptive language, comes into view as exploitative act of how death has structured us, as I sing for the war of heartbreak where every bit of myself is a tool, a weapon. (excerpt from HOT MESS/ Contemplating the body at war with itself – Some brief remarks on my own mess, by Alex Mirutziu)
Alex Mirutziu's ongoing effort to understand commodity culture, to see how what we consume defines us, leads him toward the queer paradigm, into such a mode of being which is ultimately resistant to biopolitics, to the processes of comodification/objectification, to the identitarian mode of thinking that revealed itself to be dangerously in tune with the logic of Capital, too claustrophobic and parochial.
Today when transitional Romania lives the extension of the mass media - television, color-magazines, billboards, cinema, newspapers, radio and Internet - the artist grounded in this material and political realities bodily reflects on his ideas of sexuality by assessing the possibility of articulating a view of the sexual beingness which can be translated into effective political strategies. Alex Mirutziu treats the artworld as a terrain of political, anthropological, sexual... experimentation disconnected from any utilitarian considerations imposed by the society. His works are not pleasant and one would feel even threatened by them; if not necessarily on the sentient level as an organism, than certainly metaphysically as a self. (excerpt from DE-LIBERATING SEXUALITY, an essay by Arandjel Bojanovic on Alex Mirutziu's work)
Alex Mirutziu’s point is not the discovery of pleasure, and the nude body is presented in a way to unmask the pervasive social hypocrisies, a protest against the oppressive system of control: it is not embellishment but rebellion.
One of his works, “Heaven knows I feel miserable now” shows a man with a strap around his neck, in a vain attempt to free himself from the oppression, which is not only physical but environmental, claustrophobic, as if enclosed in a small room made of severely imposed locks.
Usually a visitor of an exhibition desires to understand the meaning of the works viewed, beyond their most obvious interpretations. To understand this work to the fullest, it is sufficient to remember that in Romania, the country in which Mirutziu lived, up until 1989 anyone who was gay or listened to music unapproved by the political power was sent to jail. (excerpt from Corporally, an essay by Viviana Checchia on Alex Mirutziu's work)
