Alex Mirutziu - "Some kill their love when they are young", Galerie Rüdiger Schöttle / February 5 - March 20, 2010

Alex Mirutziu was born in Sibiu, Romania, in 1981. He studied at the art academies of Cluj-Napoca (Romania), Cuenca (Spain) and Huddersfield (UK). Today he lives and works in London and Cluj-Napoca. For his video piece Tears are precious Alex Mirutziu received the Best Independent Artist Award at the Optica International Video Art Festival in 2008 (Paris, Madrid). Alex Mirutziu’s œuvre includes photographic self-portraits, live performance, sculpture, painting and media-critical video installations.

„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.“

(extract from: HOT MESS/ Contemplating the body at war with itself - Some brief remarks on my own mess, by Alex Mirutziu)

In his first solo exhibition in Germany at the Rüdiger Schöttle Gallery Alex Mirutziu will be showing new works under the title “Some kill their love when they are young”, a reference to Oscar Wilde’s poem “The Ballade of Reading Gaol”.

WORKS

photos: Wilfried Petzi

OPENING PERFORMANCE

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SABOT-AGE! Picture Maxxification, Cultural Digestion, and Populist Elitism in the Age of Rhizomatic Economy (From Cluj with Love, Daria & Marcel)

SABOT @ INDEPENDENT, a hybrid model and temporary exhibition forum, taking place at the former X Initiative and former Dia Center for the Arts at 548 West 22nd Street in New York on March 4 – 7, 2010.
http://www.independentnewyork.com/

Location: 548 W 22nd Street, New York, NY, 10011
Phone: 917-414-7941
Thurs: 4:00 pm - 9:00 pm
Fri - Sat: 11:00 am - 8:00 pm
Sun: 12:00 pm - 4:00 pm


SABOT-AGE! Picture Maxxification, Cultural Digestion, and Populist Elitism in the Age of Rhizomatic Economy (From Cluj with Love, Daria & Marcel)

Portable works by the represented artists - Radu Comşa, Alex Mirutziu, Vlad Nancă and Alice Tomaselli, as well as special projects by friends, gray eminencies and ghostly comrades - Fia Backström, Pádraig Mullen (aka Bulletin M), Ylva Ogland, David Robbins, Lee Williams and Allais Young.


A HYBRID FORUM COMES TO NEW YORK FOR ART FAIR WEEK

INDEPENDENT,a hybrid model and temporary exhibition forum, will take place at the former X Initiative and former Dia Center for the Arts at 548 West 22nd Street in New York March 4 – 7, 2010, and will be open to the public free of charge: Thursday from 4PM to 9PM, Friday and Saturday from 11am to 8pm, and Sunday from 12pm to 4pm.
INDEPENDENT was conceived by Elizabeth Dee, New York gallerist and founder of X Initiative, and gallerist Darren Flook, from Hotel, London. Part consortium, part collective, INDEPENDENT lies somewhere between a collective exhibition and a reexamination of the art fair model, reflecting the changing attitudes and growing challenges for artists, galleries, curators and collectors. The weeklong program will host presentations and installations by highly regarded international figures and has been developed with creative advisors, Thea Westreich Art Advisory Services, New York and Matthew Higgs, Director of the nonprofit White Columns, New York. The international list of participating galleries, independent curators, publishers, and nonprofit spaces was developed through personal invitations from the founders, the advisors and, ultimately, the participants themselves. This approach has allowed the project to evolve through conversations, collaborations and shared conceptual engagements as opposed to the application process that typically characterizes the contemporary art fair. Through this ongoing interaction, the participants have entered into a consortium rather than a transactional arrangement with a governing party. Structured as a transparent financial
cooperative, each participant is aware of the project’s expenses, including rent and the support services required. The collaborative process allows for both financial efficiency and the creation of more ambitious projects. The individual concepts for presentation are met with custom spaces that are curated in relation to other projects, allowing for a dynamic and diverse flow through the vast spaces on each of the building’s four floors. There will also be a series of performances in coordination with the exhibits, collaborations between galleries presenting works together, and lectures on the ground floor throughout the week. Additionally, INDEPENDENT will present an artist project by Claire Fontaine entitled Please God Make Tomorrow Better, 2008, a neon text work above the façade’s door which will be on view 24 hours a day during the run of the project.

The list of participants is as follows:

The Approach (London)
Artists Space (New York)
Balice Hertling (Paris)
Laura Bartlett (London)
BolteLang (Zürich)
Bortolami Gallery (New York)
Galerie Isabella Bortolozzi (Berlin)
Elizabeth Dee (New York)
Dispatch (New York)
Farimani
Gavlak Gallery (Palm Beach)
gb agency (Paris)
Hard Hat (Geneva)
Hotel (London)
Galerie Ben Kaufmann (Berlin)
Johann König (Berlin)
Andrew Kreps Gallery (New York)
Lubok
Kate MacGarry (London)
McCaffrey Fine Art (New York)
Mestre Projects (Barcelona/New York)
mitterrand + sanz (Zürich)
Moss/Westreich-Wagner (New York)
New Galerie (Paris)
October
Maureen Paley (London)
Renwick Gallery (New York)
Reserved for Leo Castelli
Rodeo (Istanbul)
Sabot (Cluj-Napoca)
Stuart Shave/Modern Art (London)
Sutton Lane (London/Paris)
White Columns (New York)
Winkleman Gallery (New York)
Galerie Jocelyn Wolff (Paris)
Zero (Milan)

The INDEPENDENT Team is led by Co-Directors Laura Mitterrand and Jayne Drost. They are joined by
Exhibition Designer Ian Sullivan and Technical Coordinator David Shull.
INDEPENDENT has been sponsored in part by the exhibitors, Flash Art, Ninth Street Espresso, Farmcart,
The Jane Hotel, Café Gitane, and Mousse, Milan. For more information, please contact Laura Mitterrand
at +1.917.414.7941 or info@independentnewyork.com. Visit our website at
http://www.independentnewyork.com/

Ars Homo Erotica exhibition at The National Museum Warsaw

Ars Homo Erotica

11 June – 5 September 2010

Komisarz wystawy:

A pioneering, multimedia exhibition which offers a radically different approach to the history of art, rethinking and queering the canons of representation. The exhibition reveals the significance of homoerotic themes and the role of homoerotic aesthetics, present in art from antiquity to today. It explores the rich and varied collections of the National Museum in Warsaw, as well as presents contemporary works by Central-Eastern European artist, commissioned especially for this show. Ars Homo Erotica is the first exhibition in Central-Eastern Europe that focuses on this subject. It embraces the idea of a museum as a critical institution, contributing to the debate on key issues of contemporary public life.

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)