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

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!

REPORT: Studio #1 - Atelier de performance

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Reporting on my first attempt to lead a workshop on performance after three days of intense mental and physical training at Sabot Gallery. I teamed up with Razvan Sadean to deliver a session on performance, to six candidates eager to either clarify some of their related issues or to develop further skills in the field. 

The candidates have been asked` to develop transversal skills and awarenesses raging from few possitions on contemporary performance trends up to conceptual theories on objecthood, communication and physicality. Nevertheless, the leap started from established theoreticians and practitioners like E. Barba. P. Zarrili, among others but with a clear focus on the vast possibilities that this field can contain.

The structure was complex in the way three days allow it to be...focusing on observation, experimentation with their own fears and psycho-physical blockages, and reflection.

(all photos © Razvan Sadean)

FILM PROGRAM: ALEX MIRUTZIU at SABOT Gallery

FILM PROGRAM: ALEX MIRUTZIU. Screening of the 2010-2012 performances

June 1st, 2012, from 6 to 10 p.m. 

The program will continue until July 14th, from 4 to 8 p.m. every weekday, except Sunday and Monday

For the first time in over five years a selection of my performance based works are shown together for the wider audience who did not had the chance to attend them live in Lisbon, Rome, Vienna, Zurich, Los Angeles. If you hadn't had the chance to attend one of my performance works from 2010-2012, this is the chance to watch the recordings of nine of them, including my recent work from Stockholm with the public performing one of the Pending Works.

Listed works:

Five Moments of Silence for Pending Work #7 | 08:32min.

[IASPIS, Lucie Fontaine Studio, Stockholm, May 27th, 2012] 

The audience performs five moments of silence for five time frames of Pending Work #7, with the artist conducting. 

History is Nothing but Muscles in Action | 26:18min.

With Răzvan Sădean [Santa Catarina Palace, Lisbon, September 12th – 24th, 2011] 

This performance was eventuated as a collaborative work between Alex Mirutziu and Răzvan Sădean, both working within specific performative frames, debating powerful and controversial narratives with personal instrumentation. It originates in the idea that history rarely allows two lovers to share the same flow of time and space, to inhabit the ultimate moment in history, overlapping each other’s timeline. 

Action is Guilt / method to Rourke | 38:23min.

Performed with guest appearance by professional bodybuilder Paolo Iannettone [Spazio Vault, Prato, April 16th, 2011] 

Action is guilt questions the notion of action in relation to verifiable facticity and consensus, working with articulations and half articulations of what the artist understands as ‘action as a form of knowledge’, compelled to open itself to the event.

Mirutziu is interested in a cognitive action that is distracted, hanging around, unresolved, resistant to the impetuous logic of the project and the fixed functional form corresponding to it. Its purpose is not to represent something, but rather to make it happen.

Pending Work #3 | 15:38min.

[performance to camera, February 6th, 2011]

Surely something so basically human - closing one’s eyes, standing in silence, and allowing grief to wash over you - has no history. Or rather it encompasses all of history, so seemingly ingrained in our emotional DNA in the Act. At its core, marking occasions of great violence with such an act acknowledges a simple truth: oftentimes there just are no words to be said. (Kayla Webley)

When love melted cavalries in our hearts | 18:16min.

[Barbara Seiler Gallery, Zurich, January 14th, 2011] 

Critique on how temples move faster than their shadows | 47:23min.

[Mihai Nicodim Gallery, Los Angeles, December 11th, 2010]

An exceptional performance on the humanity of a terrible love; a shared architecture, muscled by words and rude liberty, about ‘fixing of the body’ over the exterior milieu, with the heart poised above the gut; a constructed metaphor for the astaticism of love, that sometimes you just have to tell the whole world about. 

Feeding the Horses of All Heroes | 28:08min.

[Romanian Academy in Rome, May 25th, 2010] 

What is it that strikes you about pictures of models crashing on the runway? What is striking in these pictures, and implicitly in the series of video performances called “Runway spills”, is the diffusion of focus away from the garment and onto a situation that disrupts a specific convention (falling on the catwalk); the now of fashion live performance that sometimes corrupts, and contradicts itself, in its redeployment of functions from the existence of an abstract idea to the tangible production. (Monopol Magazine | April, 2010 | interview by Barbara Gartner) 

The remains of the East | 26:48min.

With Angelique Lehmann, Alina Șerban [Wuk Theatre, Vienna, April 10th, 2010] 

The work is based on the artists’ common experience as individuals growing up under communist regimes in East Germany and Romania, on sharing life stories and trying to question the present by confronting themselves with the past. The focus lies on the history written on bodies and on the marks dictatorship leaves on skin and mind. 

Pending Work #2| 03:45min.

[performance to camera, April 4th, 2010] 

Pending work #2 adds a kind of gentle response to “La Diva Turca”, Leyla Gencer, specifically to her interpretation of Norma by Giacomo Puccini; working with fragmented narratives, interviews on technical particularities of voice and its weight, volume and modulation. 

Last seen at Manifest of Flaw exhibition

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)