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‘The Unnerving Inches of Being’ - Alex Mirutziu's Solo Exhibition at SABOT Gallery, Cluj

Added on by Alex Mirutziu.
Photo: Alex Mirutziu

Photo: Alex Mirutziu

Photos: YAP Studio

THE UNNERVING INCHES OF BEING

May 31 - July 10, 2019

Opening hours: TUE – SAT, 4pm - 7pm

SABOT

Fabricii de Chibrituri 9A, Cluj-Napoca

‘The unnerving inches of being’ concludes few years of research on the work of novelist and philosopher Iris Murdoch and the different methodologies she employed to create meaning. Preceded by Between Too Soon and Too Late, which took place at Delfina Foundation in 2018 (Mirutziu’s first solo exhibition in the UK), ‘The unnerving inches of being’ brings together a series of works informed by Murdoch’s writings and further reflects on the notion of time and space in relation to meaning.

Extending over a wide range of media and activities, including sculpture, drawing, poetry, and performance, as well as critical and curatorial projects, Mirutziu’s practice questions the way we create meaning to interpret the world around us. Highly intellectual, inspired by philosophy, literature and design, the artist explores the inadequate use of objects, language, and the body as tools of communication, confronting us with “dislocated modes of arrival at meaning.”

”Gaining in a State of Debt”: Alex Mirutziu`s first solo exhibition in Israel opens at CCA Tel Aviv

Added on by Alex Mirutziu.

GAINING IN A STATE OF DEBT

Curated by Nicola Trezzi

Dates: March 14 – April 18, 2019

Opening: March 14 at 8 pm

Performance schedule:

March 14, 8 pm (opening)
March 19, 6 pm
March 22, 12 am
April 1, 8 pm
April 10, 8 pm
April 13, 1 pm (closing)

Performed by Oran Barak, Harel Grazutis and Nunzia Picciallo

The Center for Contemporary Art

Tsadok HaCohen 2, Tel Aviv-Yafo, Israel

www.cca.org.il

The Center for Contemporary Art (CCA) presents “Gaining in a State of Debt”, the first solo exhibition by Romanian artist Alex Mirutziu (1981, Sibiu, Romania. Lives and works in Cluj-Napoca, Romania).

Mirutziu’s practice extends over a wide range of media and activities, including sculpture, drawing, poetry, and performance, as well as critical and curatorial projects. In his work, which is both highly intellectual and deeply physical, he expands the notions of approximation and proximity in connection to time, presenting “dislocated modes of arrival at meaning.” In his modus operandi, he seeks to facilitate the understanding of the body as a “turbulent performative occasion” – drawing on the poetics of homelessness and invisibility. Through his artworks, he looks at ways of suspending the set-ups of doing and un-doing, thinking and un-thinking. Alongside TAH29 (The Artist Himself at 29), he acts within a collective body whose modus operandi is “retroactive irony.”

His exhibition at CCA Tel Aviv features a new performative work, entitled Bottoms Know It, and a compilation of videos that contextualize the new work and at the same time open up new avenues of understanding. Conceived for CCA Tel Aviv and featuring three performers and three props, Bottoms Know It exposes what may come across as being implicit but unnoticed, which is not necessarily a feature of truth-making.

Through the combination of different streams of thoughts and informed by philosophical concepts that are always personalized and freely interpreted, the artist is capable of creating time-based and durational experiences between himself and the viewer, using the artwork – whether in the form of an object or a body (his own or somebody else’s) – as a channel, a catalyst, a sort of remote controller that is linking two individuals, himself and the viewer, possibly located in two different geographical and time zones. However, all the aforementioned notions never come as we usually expect them: “time-based” should be considered according to an unusual notion of time; “durational” should be perceived according to a larger scope of perception. The work of Alex Mirutziu not only makes us think, it also makes us think about the conditions allowing us to think, and un-think, to do, and un-do.

Video program (not on view during the performances):

Doing Sub Thinking, 2018. HD video, video documentation of performance, 10:51 min. Performers: Ekin Bernay, Rowdy_SS, and Jenn Vogtle. Commissioned by Block Universe Festival in collaboration with Delfina Foundation and European Art East Foundation, London. Courtesy of the artist, Galeria Sabot, Cluj-Napoca, and Galerie Rüdiger Schöttle, Munich. [video]

But as a document, 2015. HD video, performance to camera, 12:01 min. Performer: Pär Andersson; director of photography: Michael Tomescu. Courtesy of the artist, Galeria Sabot, Cluj-Napoca, and Galerie Rüdiger Schöttle, Munich. [video]

Dignity to the unsaid, 2017. HD video, 17:42 min. Word workers: Alex Popa, Irina Sibef, and Cosmin Stănilă; director of photography: Alexandru Don; camera assistant: Victor Merca. Commissioned by Marie-Laure Fleisch Gallery, Brussels. Courtesy of the artist, Galeria Sabot, Cluj-Napoca, and Galerie Rüdiger Schöttle, Munich.

Stay[s] against confusion, 2016. HD video, 14:53 min. Performer: Joshua Hubbard; director of photography: Kassandra Powell, Loukas Elark. Commissioned by Delfina Foundation, London. Courtesy of the artist, Galeria Sabot, Cluj-Napoca, and Galerie Rüdiger Schöttle, Munich. [video]

The gaze is a prolapse dressed in big business, 2018. HD video, 14:37 min. Commissioned by Frac des Pays de la Loire, Carquefou (France). Courtesy of the artist, Galeria Sabot, Cluj-Napoca, and Galerie Rüdiger Schöttle, Munich. [video]

***

“Alex Mirutziu: Gaining in a State of Debt” is curated by Nicola Trezzi in close collaboration with the artist. The exhibition is supported by Invitro, the OUTSET Residency in Tel Aviv, and the Romanian Cultural Institute – Tel Aviv. Additional support provided by Galeria Sabot, Cluj-Napoca and TAROM.

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

Added on by Alex Mirutziu.

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!

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

Added on by Alex Mirutziu.

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)

REPORT: The Glass Factory Lab residence and Time's Own Insult exhibition

Added on by Alex Mirutziu.

I've been invited to create new work in glass this summer in a very special place in Sweden. Since my arrival in Boda at the Glass Factory, up until my departure a week later my time and mind were flooded with amplitude of thoughts and curiosity. I was lucky to work closely with a very kind and gentile curator, Maja Heuer, who trusted my instinct towards glass politics. Time becomes suddenly precious when a curator genuinely believes and risks. Maja did that so perfectly and with an eye for what this experience can mean for the future of The Glass Factory. Being invited there meant that I will collaborate with one of Sweden's esteemed artists, Åsa Jungnelius, for whom I have only admiration and love.

Åsa meant a lot for my establishment in Boda and had been a close link to my performance work. We agreed that one of her installations will be shown in the gallery space of the factory and so we did. Before leaving Romania, I've been thinking of her works and made notations to a specific one, called "A study of the relationship between the hole and the pole". This particular piece has moved me from the first time I saw it on the web. I've been traveling to Sweden with this work in mind. It had occupied my thoughts before meeting it in reality. What strikes me vis a vis this work is its frankness and capacity to enmesh romanticism and philosophical dissertation with my research on chronic occupation of time, action versus duration and anti-duration and political evidence.

The thought of collaborating with an art work gave me a perfect conceptual frame in which to insert the machinery of pending works. Noticing its grandeur, the relationship between me and it, empowered a couple of films to emerge as starters, including instrumentations using complicated installations with video projectors beaming from the hotel's window into the near forest etc, works that are still in process.It become a very interesting co-performer within my project, and a very present one in my future work.

© Alex Mirutziu 

© Alex Mirutziu 

© Alex Mirutziu 

At the heart of the Glass Factory is the hotshop, a place where the core of my project was objectified, with the major help of two amazingly talented and dedicated people, who became my friends, Bjorn Friborg and Christopher Ramsey.

These two guys have made a wonderful job in its difficulty to fix my face into life masks. They've been so cooperative and careful with the whole process of casting and then with the glass process, that every day of work with them was flawless. We’ve been surpassing formulation and began implementing in a blink of an eye. Bjorn, a Danish guy, very uplifting, sensitive and caring, very interesting in his performative approach to blowing glass; had been collaborating with many artists among others Fredrik Nielsen. He had found time to help me with advices and so home like food, when working for the performance.

Christopher’s attitude towards my work and the project initiated in his studio was more than welcoming, with a calmness and readiness mixed with a warm character. He's been studying design in America and since then had made a name for himself close to glass making. Together with Maja, they were my family for the whole duration of the residency.

In the second part, I will write few observations regarding my experience with glass.To have a better understanding of the conceptual frame of my project I have to quote myself:

”There are two important conceptual triggers vis a vis Pending Works machinery. The first questions the reliability of the event and its performativity within a fluctuating timeline. The second refers to the cathexis of time and action versus duration and anti-duration and political evidence. Ultimately the chief interest in Pending works lie in the dialectic between evidence and the event as transformative of each other. I am very much interested in the idea of the chronicisation of time, and how this chronic time contaminates the work’s informational cue, and transitivity.

© Alex Mirutziu 

© Alex Mirutziu 

© Alex Mirutziu

I've been very much interested in the idea of creating life-masks at twenty-nine years old in order to perform their time over and over again; if possible to create a sort of medium out of a specific age. The logistics of this idea were very much in the hands of Chris and Bjorn, reason why I tend to say that it was a collaborative project not a solo one. Therefore I have found it very intriguing to travel to Sweden to have two people embed my corpus for eternity at twenty-nine. It is a colossal action that implies criticality towards time and medium. Very rarely one gets so close to someone else in capturing its true image; life-mask is the only medium to do that.

© Alex Mirutziu 

© Alex Mirutziu 

For this reason we've been attentive to all the details possible regarding composite materials and burning process to make this thing possible for others to see. It takes 500 degrees to heat up so history can accommodate this moment in time. Moreover there is of course the importance of the material itself, as it is alive and stubborn at times, in one word a mass of tension, that needs to be respected and carefully maneuvered. Even if at first glance this medium may look unattached to my métier, it has a very important feature that establishes it close to the more common ones in my practice, and that rests in its meditative nature, its relentless mediation, and fragility. These are very important notions in my work.

If there is a conclusion that needs to be marked, it would refer somehow to the importance of devising the concept and to the collaborative nature and its instrumentation. I’ve learned that approaching another material or medium takes time and understanding, and last but not least a dose of humbleness. I’ve chosen the best material out there that will constantly talk back to me and possibly to others. Glass has all I got at 29

© Alex Mirutziu 

© Alex Mirutziu 

© Alex Mirutziu 

© Alex Mirutziu