Controversial Customs
Summer 2010 - Romania
Daria D. Pervain and Marcel Janco
First and foremost I treat my body as a vessel, as a medium, and then as a space of resistance. I used to name it revolution-wise instrument embedded with political meaning and transversal power, transversal meaning any force physical or ideological, friendly or antagonistic that inspires emotional, conceptual and/or material deviations from the established norms.
In this respect I consider a dense and risky business to take my own body as the main place of confrontation and communication with my own memory and suffering and most of all to articulate this in a conceptual way and so forth.
In my recent work, I try to operate within notions that emerge and coagulate in the mind and perform beyond the spectator’s understanding. Queer entails these sub-notions that cause the possibility for art to explode outward and more than before my work furthers these into language.—Alex Mirutziu
Alex Mirutziu is a Romanian artist whose work cuts across multiple domains, including conceptual writing, performance, photography, and video installations. His work endows social processes with ephemeral emergence as the man constructs in an attempt to reconfigure the relation between information and form, psychophysical language and content, challenging origins and meaning. After the disturbing solo performance, Atrocity Exhibition, in 2004, he continued his research at the University of Fine Arts in Cuenca, Spain, where his performative approach resulted in the censorship of one of his projects, which provoked strong reactions among artists and scholars in both Spain and Romania. Starting in 2004, the investigation of the real began when a new anatomical specimen emerged, Lick&Destroy, a corrupt and ambiguous approach to identity, with which Mirutziu produced himself distinctively in discontinuous, contradictory realities. In 2007, the English director, John Britton, formed an experimental master class with eight heterogeneous performers, one of which was Alex Mirutziu. Shortly after the physically intensive training, he toured England with his social-comment performance, Leave Gordon Brown Alone, produced in Liverpool, Leeds, and Berlin. He received international recognition in Madrid and Paris at Optica Video Art Festival, and was awarded Best Independent Artist. He frequently works with Grit Hachmeister, VIP group, Arandjel Bojanovic, Liviana Dan, and Noa Treister. Following his Manifest of Flaw show at Sabot in October, Alex Mirutziu presented a solo project at Rüdiger Schöttle in Munich.
Photo:
Alex Mirutziu, Runway spill #1, 2009. HD video 02.19
min transferred on video DVD, screened on
81.5 x 61.5 x 6.5 cm LCD screen. Courtesy of the artist
and Rüdiger Schöttle Gallery.