4Culture has announced two years of production and development support for artist Alex Mirutziu

4Culture is happy to announce that Alex Mirutziu was the artist selected for a 2-year support and development programme as part of the Creative Crossroads project Life Long Burning (LLB) - Futures Lost and Found.

The Creative Crossroads Cycle 1 is a two-year sustainable support with tailor-made offers by the LLB3 network, consisting of residencies, co-productions, presentation possibilities et al.

Producer, partner Romania: Asociația 4 Culture

Project co-funded by LIFE LONG BURNING - FUTURES LOST AND FOUND (LLB3) of the European Union - Creative Europe Programme.

Media partners: Radio România Cultural, Modernism, Zeppelin Magazine, ARTA Magazine, Feeder, IQads, România Pozitiva

Valentina Iancu - on pioneers of Romanian queer art

ALEX MIRUTZIU – BOTTOMS KNOW IT, 2019

Valentina Iancu's writing about Alex Mirutziu's art is in a league of its own. From the publication Revista ARTA comes this thoughtful piece about the LGBTQ+ art scene in Romania.

“Ion Grigorescu’s unintentional queer touches were an inspiration for the young artist Alex Mirutziu (b. 1981), one of the first artists in Romania to consciously use a queer vocabulary. In his artworks, Mirutziu explicitly articulates his homosexual subjectivity, exploring his own desire, love, fear, pulsation and compulsion. Mirutziu centers his work on the body, often using his body to return the gaze, while making subtle sense of a “sinful and pathological” desire. Alex Mirutziu finished his visual art studies in Cluj-Napoca in 2001, the same year that homosexuality was decriminalized. He is a multidisciplinary artist working with performance, video art, theoretical texts, poetry, and drawing. His politics are oriented toward personal poetics, queerness being implicit, often abstract. Mirutziu makes use of metaphor to form an abstract queer vocabulary, understanding his art as “a protest”. Mirutziu only began including video art in his practice in 2017, extending some performances in new video art works. He doesn’t consider the documentation of a performance a work of art. Similarly, a video-documentation of a painting may not be seen as a new piece of art. His video performances ”Dignity to the Unsaid”, ”The Gaze is a Prolapse Dressed in Big Business” (2018) and ”Bottoms Know It” (2019) have performances as a starting point but end up as unique video artworks often incorporating new scenarios. Mirutziu builds his subjects rhizomatically, carefully connecting ideas so as not to fall into categorical thinking. His work investigates queer issues, mixing theoretical approaches with intuition. For example, ”Bottoms Know It” aims to give access to a distinct type of knowledge, that of the complicated relationship we have with our assholes. Centered on the poetics of anality, hence of openings, entrances, closings, exits, centers, and holes it deploys means of seeing and understanding the world and the ‘other’ taking disappearance and debasing of the self as the subject and gateway to a more profound grasp of our humanity.”

In the performance/video, three local performers (dancers) are put into situations of visual alienation. Conversing and debating about the limitations of the body, they engage in an absurdist philosophical dialogue. Anal poetics is a way of queering a penis-oriented masculinity. Anal pleasure is seen as a pathological pleasure and as a feminizing pleasure. It is hence often refused by heterosexual males out of fear of homosexuality, largely being associated with gay sexuality.”

The text was first published by East European Film Bulletin.

Valentina Iancu scrie just despre arta lui Alex Mirutziu. În publicația Revista ARTA ea descrie cu considerație scena LGBTQ+ din România.

”Valențele (neintenționat) queer care pot fi atașate artei lui Ion Grigorescu au fost o sursă de inspirație pentru tânărul artist Alex Mirutziu (n. 1981), unul din primii artiști români ce a utilizat un vocabular în mod conștient queer. În lucrările sale, Mirutziu își articulează subiectivitatea homosexuală în mod explicit, explorându-și dorința, dragostea, frica, pulsiunile  și impulsurile. Mirutziu își axează lucrările pe corp, folosindu-și deseori corpul pentru a întoarce privirea spre privitor, creând în același timp un sentiment de dorință „păcătoasă și patologică”. Alex Mirutziu a terminat studiile în artă vizuală în Cluj-Napoca în 2001, în același an în care homosexualitatea a fost dezincriminată. Este un artist multidisciplinar ce lucrează cu performance-ul, arta video, textele teoretice, poezia și desenul. Politica sa se orientează spre poetica personală, cu un substrat queer implicit, abstractizat.. Mirutziu se folosește de metaforă pentru a formula un vocabular queer abstract. Pentru el, arta sa este „un protest”. Artistul  a început să includă arta video în practica sa în 2017, extinzându-și unele performance-uri în mediul artei video. Acesta nu consideră documentarea unui performance drept operă de artă per se. În mod asemănător, documentarea video a unei picturi nu ar fi ea însăși o lucrare de artă. Performance-urile sale video ”Dignity to the Unsaid”, ”The Gaze is a Prolapse Dressed in Big Business” (2018) și ”Bottoms Know It” (2019) pornesc de la performance-uri, însă ajung să fie opere unice de artă video, incluzând adesea scenarii noi. Mirutziu își construiește subiecții în mod rizomatic, conectând ideile în așa fel încât să nu cadă în gândirea categorică. Operele sale cercetează problematici queer, punând laolaltă abordările teoretice și intuiția. ”Bottoms Know It”, de exemplu, urmărește să​ „ofere acces la un tip anume de cunoaștere, acela al relațiilor complicate pe care le avem cu găoazele noastre. Axându-se pe poetica analității, deci a deschiderilor, intrărilor, închiderilor, ieșirilor, centrelor și găurilor, lucrarea angrenează mijloace de a vedea și înțelege lumea și pe «celălalt», luând dispariția și înjosirea sinelui drept subiectul și calea către o mai profundă concepție asupra umanității noastre.​

În acest performance/video, trei performeri (dansatori) locali sunt puși în situații de alienare vizuală. Discutând și dezbătând limitele corpului, aceștia se lansează într-un dialog filosofic absurd. Poeticile anale reprezintă un mod de a queeriza un anumit tip de masculinitate bazat pe penis. Plăcerea anală este văzută drept o plăcere patologică și feminizatoare. Fiind asociată în general cu sexualitatea gay, este astfel deseori respinsă de bărbații heterosexuali dintr-o frică de homosexualitate.”

Traducere în limba română de Rareș Groza și Marina Oprea. Textul original a fost publicat de East European Film Bulletin.

New acquisitions to be shown at the National Museum of Contemporary Art - Bucharest

HeartBeat 22

March 16 - October 01, 2023

National Museum of Contemporary Art - Bucharest

Aripa E4

www.mnac.ro

Due to the repeated generosity of the Ministry of Culture, a total of 385 works (359 acquisitions, 26 donations) entered the MNAC Bucharest heritage in 2020 and 2022. HEARTBEAT 22 focuses, of course, on last year's session, but clearly benefits from the gains and conclusions of both moments.

HEARTBEAT 22 no longer possesses the drama of the previous exhibition (presented at the MNAC Bucharest headquarters under the title 12 Years After, and at Kunsthalle Bega and the Craiova Museum of Art respectively, under that of HEARTBEAT 20), but brings us face to face with new challenges.

The spatial layout of the 2020 exhibition underlined the volatile nature of the relationship between the Museum and artistic production, emphasising ephemerality, improvisation and chance. Two years (and a bit more) later, in the main space of MNAC Bucharest, the acquisitions exhibition reflects the fact that we (artists, specialists, public) participate in the process of building the collection of an institution whose role (among others) is to elaborate the canon of the production of visual creators from/active in post-war Romania.

Concluding the event, in the Dialog space on the 4th floor of the museum, a new exhibition opens, in which seven young artists at the beginning of their career engage in a collective creative and curatorial exercise.

You will see artworks purchased from the following artists: Ana Adam, Arina Ailincăi, Silvia Amancei & Bogdan Armanu, Alexandru Antik, Apparatus 22, Olimpiu Bandalac, József Bartha, Liliana Basarab, Cătălin Bălescu, Ioana Bătrânu, Matei Bejenaru, Anca Benera & Arnold Estefan, Alex Bodea, Irina Botea Bucan, Lucian Bran, Michele Bressan, Liviu Bulea, Cătălin Burcea, Flaviu Cacoveanu, Andrei Chintilă, Aneta Mona Chișa, Dan Cioca, Ciprian Ciuclea, Radu Comșa, Ștefan Constantinescu, Judit Crăciun, Ștefan Radu Crețu, Giulia Crețulescu, Casia Csehi, Miklósi Dénes, Georgiana Dobre & Kjersti Vetterstad, Suzana Fântânariu, Florin Ghenade, Irina Gheorghe, Dani Ghercă, Ana Golici, Nicolae Golici, Teodor Graur, Ion Grigorescu, Dorina Horătău, Mihai Iepure-Górski, Lucia Ghegu, Gheorghe Ilea, Nicu Ilfoveanu, Pavel Ilie, Lucian Indrei, Adelina Ivan, Péter Jecza, Aurora Király, Iosif Király, Szabolcs KissPál, Kund Kopacz, Peter Krausz, Stela Lie, Maxim Liulca, Petru Lucaci, Dragoș Lumpan, Maria Mandea, Andreea Medar, Liliana Mercioiu Popa, Mihai Mihalcea, Olivia Mihălțianu, Alex Mirutziu, Adina Mocanu, Sebastian Moldovan, Ciprian Mureșan, Ion Aurel Mureșan, Vasile Mureșan (Murivale), Sarah Muscalu, Andrei Nacu, Dumitru Oboroc, Christian Paraschiv, Alexandru Păsat, Szacsva y Pál, Cosmin Paulescu, Eugenia Pop, Maria Pop Timaru, Dana Popa, Iulia Toma, Laurențiu Ruță Fulger, Mircea Tohătan, Titu Toncian, Marilena Preda-Sânc, Șerban Radu, Gheorghe Rasovszky, Lea Rasovszky, Bogdan Rața, Cătălin Rulea, Șerban Savu, Elena Scutaru, Larisa Sitar, Ioana Stanca, Liviu Stoicoviciu, Ștefan (Afane) Teodoreanu, Patricia Teodorescu, Dan Vezentan, Ecaterina Vrana, Mădălina Zaharia & Ryan Ormonde, Mihai Zgondoiu. And artworks donated by: Michele Bressan, Nicolae Golici, Cătălin-Marius Petrișor-Hereșanu, Dana Popa, Patricia Teodorescu.

JURY MEMBERS

Horea AVRAM – President of the Romanian branch of the International Association of Art Critics (AICA), representative of the Union of Romanian Visual Artists

Cătălin DAVIDESCU – Curator, art critic, Craiova

Prof. Univ. Dr. Ruxandra DEMETRESCU – Doctoral School of the National University of Arts in Bucharest

Dr. Zoran ERIĆ – Independent curator; 2002-2021: Chief curator of the Belgrade Contemporary Art Museum (member of the MNAC Scientific Board)

Conf. Univ. Dr. Cătălin GHEORGHE –  the Art History and Theory Department of the Visual Arts and Design Faculty, the “George Enescu” National Arts University in Iași

Diana MARINCU – Artistic director, Art Encounters Foundation, Timișoara

Frances MORRIS – Director, Tate Modern, London (member of the MNAC Scientific Board)

Conf. Univ. Dr. Mara-Victoria RAȚIU – Rector, The Arts and Design University in Cluj-Napoca (member of the MNAC Scientific Board)

Jarosław SUCHAN – Curator independent; 2006-2022: Director Muzeum Sztuki Łódź, Polonia (member of the MNAC Scientific Board)

Andrei SICLODI – Director of Künstlerhaus Büchsenhausen (member of the MNAC Scientific Board)

"Romanian Film Lounge #Berlinale 2023": films by Alex Mirutziu from the National Museum of Contemporary Art of Romania collection were shown at the Rumanisches Kulturinstitut, Berlin

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A survey of Romanian video art and its developments as seen from a historical, aesthetic but also socio-political viewpoint, spanning from the end of the 70s to the present day.

Alex Mirutziu’s (b.1981, Romania, living between Romania and the UK) practice extends over a wide range of media and activities, including sculpture, film, drawing, poetry and performance as well as critical and curatorial projects. Mirutziu’s practice interrogates the difficulty of dying, the immediate triviality of guilt as manifested in actions whose consequences cannot be fully imagined. He questions continuity as an irreversible, irreparable paradigm in video, performance, and mixed-media installations, and he looks for ways to materialize the conceptual and visceral sides of notions like loss, alienation, and abandonment.

“At the border of photograph and moving image, Self-portrait at 32 is a split screen showing the tops of two dilapidated buildings out of which sprouts some vegetation. The image remains almost motionless apart the delicate and subtle sway of the stems in the wind. Spontaneous vegeta-tion grows in unattended areas of the urban environment, reclaiming the ones controlled spaces and their ruins. they indicate the low economic value of the empty lots and of the dereliction of the former industrial areas. nevertheless, recently it has been shown that they actually contribute significantly to the health of the urban and rural ecosystem, as a metaphor for the condition of the artist, and a gay male in society characterized by widespread homophobia, this piece is also a tribute to the marginalized that nevertheless constitute an essential component of the character of the whole of society. the loneliness and isolation the video evokes is an expression of the artist’s own internal struggle with his position in the world, but through resilience, as we also observe in the plants that create space for themselves and reclaim what was once theirs, he succeeds in spite of environmental adversity.” (text by Olga Stefan)

Self-portrait at 32 - HD video, 1’, 2014 | From the National Museum of Contemporary Art of Romania (MNAC Bucharest) collection

Tears are Precious - Video, 2’55’’, 2007 | From the National Museum of Contemporary Art of Romania (MNAC Bucharest) collection

Alex Mirutziu in residency at UFERSTUDIOS Für Zeitgenössischen Tanz - Berlin in November 2022

Alex Mirutziu is in a short residency at Berlin’s UFERSTUDIOS Für Zeitgenössischen Tanz in preparation for an upcoming performance, supported by 4Culture Association Bucharest and Uferstudios Berlin.

With the support of: UFERSTUDIOS (Berlin) - as part of Life Long Burning.