REARVIEW MIRROR at the Art Gallery of Alberta

Added on January 19, 2012 by Alex Mirutziu.

REARVIEW MIRROR: New Art from Central and Eastern Europe opens January 28 – April 29, 2012 at the Art Gallery of Alberta.

Coming of age during the rise of capitalism, 22 young artists challenge preconceptions of Central and Eastern Europe as a historical, social and political monolith.

This highly-anticipated exhibition features the work of 22 contemporary artists from 11 different Eastern European countries, whose work references the specific social and political histories of their respective homelands. Born mostly in the late 1970s and early 1980s, the artists comment on the political and social changes that have come to pass following the fall of the Berlin Wall and the end of the socialist period of their parents’ generation. In doing so they dismantle stereotypical notions of Eastern Europe, and question the perception of it as being socially and culturally unified.

Instead, the artists in REARVIEW MIRROR draw upon a variety of sources, their different histories, geographies and cultures, as a means to reflect on the past but also comprehend the present. The conceptualization of political and social change is integral themes related to the works presented in the exhibition.

This exhibition is guest-curated for the AGA by internationally-acclaimed curator, Christopher Eamon and produced in partnership with The Power Plant Contemporary Art Gallery in Toronto.

Presented by in Edmonton by Enbridge.

EXCLUSIVE MEDIA PREVIEW

Friday, January 27, 2 pm,

Art Gallery of Alberta

Itinerary: AGA REMARKS: Catherine Crowston, Acting Executive Director / Chief Curator

GUEST CURATOR:

Christopher Eamon

ARTISTS: Taras Polataiko and Gintaras Didžiapetris will be in attendance and available for interviews.

Rearview Mirror: (Review Article) by Milena Tomic

Added on December 19, 2011 by Alex Mirutziu.

Identificatory scenarios abound in Rearview Mirror: New Art from Central and Eastern Europe, which is co-produced by The Power Plant Art Gallery in Toronto and the Art Gallery of Alberta in Edmonton. As the site of a subject’s first encounter with their own image as Other, the mirror appears in both literal and figurative guise in a number of the works on display here. And yet the subjectivities invoked in Rearview Mirror resist familiar calls to identification. While the two Canadian venues will undoubtedly introduce well-established artists from the region to new audiences, visitors may not realize to what extent such work comes preloaded with ideological baggage. Historically, neo-avant-garde gestures under socialism were more resistant to being absorbed by market forces than those in the West for the simple reason that an art market did not exist there in the first place. The very different support structures available to artists meant that outwardly similar actions were potentially met with different political consequences and were thus dislocated from their more universalizing counterparts. In an analogous way, every artistic gesture was already politicized because of the context it appeared in.

Canadian-born and US-based curator Christopher Eamon brings together works by 23 younger artists in way that simultaneously utilizes and underplays the legacies of political repression and the realities of economic transition and the attendant problems of exclusion. Rearview Mirror is not about Eastern European art per se, but a vaguely triumphal “new” art whose practitioners have largely overcome the marginality that plagued their predecessors.

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Related posts:

· Alex Mirutziu - "Pop" video at ArtGallery of Alberta until April
· REARVIEW MIRROR at the ArtGallery of Alberta
· Alex Mirutziu in "The RearviewMirror" [catalogue]
· REARVIEW MIRROR: NEW ART FROM CENTRAL ANDEASTERN EUROPE // On view until 5 September, 2011
· Rearview Mirror at THE POWER PLANT - 1 July -5 September, 2011

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Eamon’s second tendency is “an attraction to popular culture as expressed in some of the globally dominant entertainment industries.” For example, Ciprian Mureşan’s Un Chien Andalou (2004) has characters from Shrekappropriate the eye-cutting scene from the Surrealist film, swapping grainy live action for slick 3D animation. Again in single-channel video, Alex Mirutziu’s Pop (2006-2007) re-imagines historical body art through the comparatively sedate act of a hand flipping through a fashion magazine. Both works create a sense of distance from the source material in ways that allow for extended contemplation not of typical Central and Eastern European concerns, but of the wider neoliberal context to which all such images belong.

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Read more:
www.artmargins.com/index.php/2-articles/643-rearview-mirror-new-art-from-central-and-eastern-europe .................................................................................................................................................................

Alex Mirutziu in "The Rearview Mirror" [catalogue]

Added on November 16, 2011 by Alex Mirutziu.

www.thepowerplant.org

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

Added on August 26, 2011 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.

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.

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.

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

REARVIEW MIRROR: NEW ART FROM CENTRAL AND EASTERN EUROPE // On view until 5 September, 2011

Added on August 26, 2011 by Alex Mirutziu.

Participating artists: Pawel Althamer (Poland); Anetta Mona Chisa (Czech Republic) and Lucia Tkácová (Slovakia); Gintaras Didziapetris (Lithuania); Dušica Drazic (Serbia); Igor Eškinja Croatia); Johnson & Johnson (Estonia); Anna Kolodziejska (Poland); David Maljkovic (Croatia); Ján Mancuška (Czech Republic); Dénes Miklósi (Romania); Alex Mirutziu (Romania); Anna Molska (Poland); Ivan Moudov (Bulgaria); Ciprian Muresan (Romania); Deimantas Narkevicius (Lithuania); Roman Ondák (Slovakia); Anna Ostoya (Poland); Taras Polataiko (Ukraine); Wilhelm Sasnal (Poland); Sislej Xhafa (Kosova); and Katarina Zdjelar (Serbia).*

Curated by Christopher Eamon
Organized by The Power Plant and the Art Gallery of Alberta

Rearview Mirror is a large thematic exhibition that brings together the work of a new generation of artists from Central and Eastern Europe. Looking both to the past and to the future, the works by the twenty-two artists in the exhibition engage post-conceptual strategies and forms, and collectively challenge accepted notions of Eastern Europe as a social, political and art historical monolith.

In an attempt to alter stereotypes of Eastern Art and "Easternness" in general, the exhibition is a kind of preliminary experiment and dialogue in the post-socialist period. Twenty years after the fall of the Berlin wall, one might expect great changes in the cultural practices in the region known since the Yalta agreement as the "Eastern Bloc" even though the political cultures and histories of the various nations comprising it greatly diverge. Indeed this is the case in many practices that have been selected mainly for the artists' choices of non-traditional forms that range in media from video, installation and performance to sculpture and painting.

Related posts:

» Rearview Mirror at THE POWER PLANT - 1 July - 5 September, 2011

» Alex Mirutziu in "The Rearview Mirror" [catalogue]

» Alex Mirutziu - "Pop" video at Art Gallery of Alberta until April

Rearview Mirror is not an exhibition that attempts to be all-inclusive or encyclopedic. It brings together the work of artists from diverse backgrounds and histories to look at the non-traditional practices of a younger generation of artists from the last decade, presenting an opportunity to view artworks by relative newcomers such as Ciprian Muresan, Gintaras Didziapetris and Anna Molska in the context of some of their contemporaries already known through international art circuits such as Pawel Althamer, Roman Ondák and Wilhelm Sasnal.

Christopher Eamon is a Canadian-born, New York-based independent curator who has curated numerous international exhibitions, and edited and written for a wide number of publications.

The exhibition is a co-presentation with the Art Gallery of Alberta, where it will be on view from
27 January – 29 April, 2012. Rearview Mirror is accompanied by a substantial publication, co-published by The Power Plant and the Art Gallery of Alberta.

— all images except "Pop" stills, courtesy Steve Payne taken at The Power Plant, Toronto —