Alex Mirutziu - I am bipolar
PLAY DICE WOULD BE NICE
April 13 – June 8, 2012
Opening reception: Friday April 13, 6-9 pm
[ Gaudel de Stampa | 3, rue de Vaucouleurs, 75011 Paris ]
A BRAND NEW BABY CARRIAGE STANDING THERE ON THE PORCH
Uriel Orlow, Untitled (from the series What Cannot Be Seen), 2012
A BRAND NEW BABY CARRIAGE STANDING THERE ON THE PORCH
Pauline Bastard, Dina Danish, Rubén Grilo, Shana Lutker, Alex Mirutziu, Uriel Orlow, Annaïk Lou Pitteloud, Sebastian Schaub
April 14 - June 02, 2012
Preview: Friday, April 13, 2012 from 6 - 9 pm
“The cradle rocks above an abyss, and common sense tells us that our existence is but a brief crack of light between two eternities of darkness. Although the two are identical twins, man, as a rule, views the prenatal abyss with more calm than the one he is heading for (at some forty-five hundred heartbeats an hour). I know, however, of a young chronophobiac who experienced something like panic when looking for the first time at homemade movies that had been taken a few weeks before his birth. He saw a world that was practically unchanged-the same house, the same people- and then realized that he did not exist there at all and that nobody mourned his absence. He caught a glimpse of his mother waving from an upstairs window, and that unfamiliar gesture disturbed him, as if it were some mysterious farewell. But what particularly frightened him was the sight of a brand-new baby carriage standing there on the porch, with the smug, encroaching air of a coffin; even that was empty, as if, in the reverse course of events, his very bones had disintegrated.”
In ‘Speak, Memory’, Vladimir Nabokov describes the birth of his own sense of time and of being as ‘tremendously invigorating’. It was the comparison of the age of his parents, thirty-three and twenty-seven, with his own age of four, that brought about his sense of himself as separate from the world around him, along with the realization, that the world had been there before his entrance. Nabokov describes this revelation as his second baptism: "I felt myself plunged abruptly into a radiant and mobile medium that was no other than the pure element of time. One shared it – just as excited bathers share shinning seawater – with creatures that were not oneself but that were joined to one by time’s common flow, an environment quite different from the spatial world". This early intuition is akin to the theory of Duration by French philosopher Henri Bergson, who attempted to redefine the modern conceptions of time, space, and causality. Seeing Duration as a mobile and fluid concept, Bergson argued that one couldn’t understand Duration through "immobile" analysis, but only through experiential, first-person intuition. In his essay ‘The Creative Mind: An Introduction to Metaphysics’ he described the dilemma of measuring time: the moment, one attempted to measure, was gone at the moment one attempted to measure that specific moment. He concluded that the inner life of man as a form of Duration was neither a unity nor a quantitative multiplicity but could only be shown indirectly through images and could only be understood through a simple intuition of the imagination. ‘Speak, Memory’ is a systematically correlated assemblage of personal recollections, images and words, which transcend the limitations of ordinary time. Characters appear and reappear in different contexts and at different moments, disintegrating the narrative structure and questioning not only the reality of the recollections but also the linearity of time. “I confess I do not believe in time. I like to fold my magic carpet, after use, in such a way as to superimpose one part of the pattern upon another. Let visitors trip. And the highest enjoyment of timelessness-in a landscape selected at random-is when I stand among rare butterflies and their food plants. This is ecstasy, and behind the ecstasy is something else, which is hard to explain. It is like a momentary vacuum into which rushes all that I love. A sense of oneness with sun and stone. A thrill of gratitude to whom it may concern-to the contrapuntal genius of human fate or to tender ghosts humoring a lucky mortal.”
This exhibition affiliates eight young artists who share in their work a preoccupation with the concept of time and investigation of elements of time. One group of works on display can be categorized as attempt to (re-)create time through different time-based elements which can take place within the tool (i.e. video camera), through a narrative or a process, but is not limited to a specific medium such as film but also includes two-dimensional images. One group of works investigates the measurement of time whereas the measuring tools have been alienated of their original function. Another group of works looks at time as a recollection of memories. Akin to Nabokov’s ‘magic carpet’ they create images of past events and times, though memories of other people, through objects that serve as placeholders, though found objects or photographs. By displaying them as collage or parallel to one-another the artists question whether these memories can serve as evidence or if they are, at least in some parts, rather fictitious, thus ultimately questioning the linearity of time. The most radical questioning of the concept of time can be seen in a work on view that does not yet exist but can only be seen in the form of a pending work.
BARBARA SEILER GALERIE - Anwandstrasse 67 CH - 8004 Zürich
Works and Interview through Sculpture
WORKS AND INTERVIEW THROUGH SCULPTURE
Alex Mirutziu - Razvan Sadean
from March 16, 2012 - May 6, 2012
Vault Gallery, Prato, Italy
This project, presented in Italy for the first time at Vault Gallery, is a collaboration between the two Romanian artists Alex Mirutziu (1981, Sibiu, RO) and Razvan Sadean (1987, Sfantu Gheorghe, RO) as the natural end of their shared experience during an artistic residency at the Ze Dos Bois Centre in Lisbon in 2011. Both artists they were oriented to the performance, using their body as a kind of machine for eviscerating dark, obscene and gory aspects of the surrounding reality. The exhibition is divided into two "dimensional" works (a series of four photographs from the video "History is nothing but muscles in action" and a performance "Interview through Sculpture") and two video projections, where the physical element and the body rise to a pivot around which all the work rotates. Starting from the critical aspect of Who-Is-What and What-Is-Who, the two artists move like living sculptures with the intent to study human action, starting from the purely muscular process until the time that an action can be defined as that and established its relevance over time. They are both the creators and the product of their work with clear references to the contemporary tradition of body art, almost as if they would be incorporated into their work, negotiating a possible way out of this world which they have self-created and that apparently seems to leave no escape.
Alex Mirutziu: His work draws on different fields of research, writing, theatre, photography, video and lately mainly to the performance. The artist proposes a survey of social and political processes that he calls revolutionary, and his body in all its ambiguity, it is the preferred solution.
Razvan Sadean: Even his work includes germination from contemporary writing, web-art, photography and literature. In his works he focuses so obsessively on the dramatic materiality of the body, so obscene, socially awkward and often with extreme realism.
INTERVIEW: Christopher Eamon on Rearview Mirror exhibition
A video of a Lithuanian officer reenacting the way he used to shoot missiles from a Russian base; an imprint of a dirt road; footage of a Serbian woman swaying to David Bowie's "Young Americans.”
These are some of the powerful images from the Art Gallery of Alberta’s newest exhibition, Rearview Mirror: New Art from Central and Eastern Europe, which portrays contemporary life in the region after the fall of the Soviet Union.
Featuring the work of 22 Central and Eastern European artists, it includes paintings, video installations and sculptures examining pop culture, everyday life and appropriation. Guest-curator Christopher Eamon, a New York writer and independent curator, hopes it will break old stereotypes of the region. Stereotypes that it is "banal … uniform. That it is lacking in some way." The new generation of artists, such as those featured at the AGA until April 29, he says, are “completely different than a clichéd concept of the East.”
Why should people come see this show?
I think they should see it because it's showing a different angle of the Eastern European art scene. It's hopefully going to be a revelation that dispels a lot of myths. It showcases the younger generation, who have really thrown off the historical shackles 20 years after the fall of the Soviet Union.
What surprised you while you were putting this show together?
What I should have known is that each of these regions has totally distinct cultures; many of them speak very distinct languages. In terms of art, some have very deep avant-garde tendencies from the beginning of the century and some have none. We really have a totally diverse and divergent area and very quickly I learned that I am not making a representative show of the region […] What I am doing is, hopefully, showing how reality on the ground dispels the idea that there is such a thing as the East as we knew it.
What did you learn about these artists?
Appropriation — which has been very prevalent in Western contemporary art for decades […] Some of the artists from the East in this exhibition take that idea so far that they literally steal things, and that is fascinating. It kind of pushes the envelope.
What are some examples of things from this show that have been stolen?
There are sets of keys. There are staplers. There are all kinds of objects stolen directly from commercial galleries in the West. The art team Anetta Mona Chisa and Lucia Tkacova literally went and stole objects from commercial Western galleries. It is a comment on social disparity, actually. There is also an artist from Bulgaria, Ivan Moudov, who stole pieces of artwork from a gallery, but I am not going to name them because he might get in trouble.
Is it the region that ties the show together?
No. There are many artists from the region that are excellent. What really ties it all together is their approach to art-making. It's the pushing of the boundaries, the experimental nature, and I am calling it 'post-conceptual.' It is idea-driven. That is what is bringing them all together.
A painting of a painting. Ukrainian artist Taras Polataiko, who is now based in Lethbridge, photographed pictures of work by Constructivist Kazimir Malevich from an art book. "They are glossy, so the light is reflecting back to the camera," Polataiko says.
A work by Polish artist Anna Kolodziejska
An video installation of Elvis's last concert before he died. A clip of obscure American musician Daniel Johnson singing about a ghost follows. "There is a lot of pathos in this," Eamon says. "It's about death and loss. One is an anti-hero and one is a hero."
(info taken from: http://avenueedmonton.com/blogs/art-preview-rearview-mirror)
"Pop" video to be shown at Art Gallery of Alberta until April
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| Art Gallery of Alberta |
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| Still from video POP by Alex Mirutziu |
Guest-curated by Christopher Eamon
In a rearview mirror
I suddenly saw
the mass of the cathedral in Beauvais;
large things inhabit small, briefly.
(Rearview Mirror from Going to Lwow, 1985)
Rearview Mirror is a large thematic exhibition that brings together the work of a new generation of contemporary artists from Central and Eastern Europe.
Twenty years after the fall of the Berlin Wall, one might expect great changes in the cultural practices in the region known as the Eastern Bloc, even though the political cultures and histories of the various nations that comprise it greatly diverge. Rearview Mirror brings together artists from these diverse backgrounds and histories, who engage with post-conceptual strategies and forms, and artistic practices that range in media from video, installation and performance to sculpture and painting. Looking both to the past and to the future, the work of these 22 artists represent 11 different countries and collectively challenge accepted notions of Eastern Europe as a social, political and art historical monolith.
The exhibition does not attempt to be all-inclusive or encyclopaedic; instead it is a preliminary investigation in which one can find moments of dialogue, convergence as well as difference. It is a unique opportunity to view art works by a new generation of artists, such as Ciprian Muresan, Gintaras Dzidziapetris and Anna Molska in the context of some of their contemporaries who are already well-established in the international art world: Pawel Althamer, Roman Ondák and Wilhelm Sasnal. Artists in the exhibition include:
Paweł Althamer (Poland), Anetta Mona Chişa (Romania/Czech Republic) with Lucia Tkáčová (Slovakia), Gintaras Didžiapetris (Lithuania), Dušica Dražić, (Serbia), Igor Eškinja (Croatia), Johnson & Johnson (Estonia), Anna Kołodziejska (Poland), David Maljković (Croatia), Ján Mančuška (Czech Republic), Dénes Miklósi (Romania), Alex Mirutziu (Romania), Anna Molska (Poland), Ivan Moudov (Bulgaria), Ciprian Mureşan (Romania), Deimantas Narkevičius (Lithuania), Roman Ondák (Slovakia), Anna Ostoya (Poland), Taras Polataiko (Ukraine), Wilhelm Sasnal (Poland), Sislej Xhafa (Kosova), Katarina Zdjelar (Serbia)
On January 31, 2010, the newly constructed Art Gallery of Alberta (AGA) opened its doors to an eager public. Located in downtown Edmonton’s arts district on the north-east corner of Sir Winston Churchill Square, the long road from conception to construction had finally reached its end.
Los Angeles-based architect Randall Stout’s dynamic design is the first boundary pushing infrastructure to be erected in Alberta in decades. More importantly, it symbolizes that a strong appreciation for visual art exists in this province, as the Government of Alberta committed a total of $27 million toward funding the gallery’s new facility.