Performance screening at Sabot Gallery with works by Alex Mirutziu

   all images belong to Alex Mirutziu 

SPECTACOLUL X MILIMETRI DIN Y KILOMETRI PE SCENA TEATRULUI GONG DIN SIBIU

Luni, 4.06.2012, ora 19.00 și si Marți 5.06.2012, ora 19.00, Teatrul Gong din Sibiu, va fi gazda spectacolului X milimetri din Y kilometri, un spectacol de Gianina Cărbunariu, producție a ColectivA - proiect realizat cu sprijinul Administrației Fondului Cultural Național. 

X milimetri din Y kilometri

Un spectacol de Gianina Cărbunariu

Video: Ciprian Mureșan

Asistent de regie: Alexandra Felseghi

Distribuția: Toma Dănila, Paula Gherghe, Mădălina Ghițescu, Rolando Matsangos

Producție: ColectivA

Proiect realizat cu sprijinul Administrației Fondului Cultural Național

Deși respectă multe din regulile dramatice de bază, scenariul spectacolului nu are un autor în sensul clasic al cuvântului. Cele 10 pagini de text sunt doar câțiva milimetri dintr-un scenariu aparținînd unor opere complete kilometrice. Personajele sunt oameni reali, contemporani cu noi, iar orice asemănare nu este deloc întîmplătoare.

Stenograma discuției ce a avut loc în 1985 la sediul Comitetul Municipal al  Partidului Comunist din București face parte din dosarul de urmărire al scriitorului dizident Dorin Tudoran, publicat de acesta cu titlul Eu, fiul lor. Dosar de Securitate. Deși tine de dramaturgia unei alte epoci, replici din stenogramă sună de parcă discuţia ar avea loc astăzi. Lipsa de solidaritate, de reacţie, aroganța puterii faţă de cetăţeni, oportunismul relaţiei intelectualilor cu această putere, normalitatea privită ca nebunie și ca excepție de la regula pasivității și schizofreniei cotidiene – sunt şi teme ale societăţii româneşti de astăzi.

Nu “reconstituirea” momentului este miza demersului nostru, ci exercițiul de a înțelege ce sunt dosarele Securității: documente care ne-ar putea ajuta sa descifrăm trecutul? un adevăr parțial? o saga cu multe ramificații și cu un autor colectiv – poporul român? o maculatură? o bombă care ar putea exploda în fiecare moment? o moștenire ciudată pe care o ducem cu noi fără să știm ce să facem cu ea? jurnale ale vieții de zi cu zi ținute fără ca cei care au fost personaje să-și fi dorit aceste jurnale? Câtă ficțiune și câtă realitate? Ce e de făcut acum și de acum încolo? Cît de prezent este trecutul recent?

Spectacolul va fi însoțit de fiecare dată de discuții cu publicul.

Intrarea la spectacol este liberă, în limita locurilor disponibile.

FILM PROGRAM: ALEX MIRUTZIU at SABOT GALLERY

FILM PROGRAM: ALEX MIRUTZIU

Screening of the 2010-2012 performances

June 1st, 2012, from 6 to 10 p.m.

\ the program will continue until July 14th, from 4 to 8 p.m. every weekday, except Sunday and Monday

For the first time in over five years a selection of my performance based works are shown together for the wider audience who did not had the chance to attend them live in Lisbon, Rome, Vienna, Zurich, Los Angeles. If you hadn't had the chance to attend one of my performance works from 2010-2012, this is the chance to watch the recordings of nine of them, including my recent work from Stockholm with the public performing one of the Pending Works. 

Listed works:

Five Moments of Silence for Pending Work #7 | 08:32min.

[IASPIS, Lucie Fontaine Studio, Stockholm, May 27th, 2012] 

The audience performs five moments of silence for five time frames of Pending Work #7, with the artist conducting. 

History is Nothing but Muscles in Action | 26:18min.

/ with Răzvan Sădean

[Santa Catarina Palace, Lisbon, September 12th – 24th, 2011] 

This performance was eventuated as a collaborative work between Alex Mirutziu and Răzvan Sădean, both working within specific performative frames, debating powerful and controversial narratives with personal instrumentation. It originates in the idea that history rarely allows two lovers to share the same flow of time and space, to inhabit the ultimate moment in history, overlapping each other’s timeline. 

Action is Guilt / method to Rourke | 38:23min.

/ performed with guest appearance by professional bodybuilder Paolo Iannettone

[Spazio Vault, Prato, April 16th, 2011] 

Action is guilt questions the notion of action in relation to verifiable facticity and consensus, working with articulations and half articulations of what the artist understands as ‘action as a form of knowledge’, compelled to open itself to the event.

Mirutziu is interested in a cognitive action that is distracted, hanging around, unresolved, resistant to the impetuous logic of the project and the fixed functional form corresponding to it. Its purpose is not to represent something, but rather to make it happen. 

Pending Work #3 | 15:38min.

[performance to camera, February 6th, 2011]

Surely something so basically human - closing one’s eyes, standing in silence, and allowing grief to wash over you - has no history. Or rather it encompasses all of history, so seemingly ingrained in our emotional DNA in the Act. At its core, marking occasions of great violence with such an act acknowledges a simple truth: oftentimes there just are no words to be said. (Kayla Webley) 

When love melted cavalries in our hearts | 18:16min.

[Barbara Seiler Gallery, Zurich, January 14th, 2011] 

Critique on how temples move faster than their shadows | 47:23min.

[Mihai Nicodim Gallery, Los Angeles, December 11th, 2010] 

An exceptional performance on the humanity of a terrible love; a shared architecture, muscled by words and rude liberty, about ‘fixing of the body’ over the exterior milieu, with the heart poised above the gut; a constructed metaphor for the astaticism of love, that sometimes you just have to tell the whole world about. 

Feeding the Horses of All Heroes | 28:08min.

[Romanian Academy in Rome, May 25th, 2010] 

What is it that strikes you about pictures of models crashing on the runway?

What is striking in these pictures, and implicitly in the series of video performances called “Runway spills”, is the diffusion of focus away from the garment and onto a situation that disrupts a specific convention (falling on the catwalk); the now of fashion live performance that sometimes corrupts, and contradicts itself, in its redeployment of functions from the existence of an abstract idea to the tangible production. (Monopol Magazine | April, 2010 | interview by Barbara Gartner) 

The remains of the East | 26:48min.

/ with Angelique Lehmann, Alina Șerban

[Wuk Theatre, Vienna, April 10th, 2010] 

The work is based on the artists’ common experience as individuals growing up under communist regimes in East Germany and Romania, on sharing life stories and trying to question the present by confronting themselves with the past.

The focus lies on the history written on bodies and on the marks dictatorship leaves on skin and mind. 

Pending Work #2| 03:45min.

[performance to camera, April 4th, 2010] 

Pending work #2 adds a kind of gentle response to “La Diva Turca”, Leyla Gencer, specifically to her interpretation of Norma by Giacomo Puccini; working with fragmented narratives, interviews on technical particularities of voice and its weight, volume and modulation. 

SABOT 

12 Horea str., ap. 10 

Cluj-Napoca 400038 

Romania

www.galeria-sabot.ro

PENDING WORKS at IASPIS, STOCKHOLM

Five moments of silence for Pending Work #7 



Preparatory for Pending Work #6 (seven punch lines) / site-specific wall drawing, Iaspis, Stockholm, Lucie Fontaine Studio

Alex Mirutziu at IASPIS // PUBLIC OF STOCKHOLM TO PERFORM PENDING WORK #7

Five moments of silence for Pending Work #7

Note #3 to Pending work # 2 (Homage a Gencer) 2011 - Digital print on

photographic paper

ALEX MIRUTZIU : WHAT IS THE REALITY OF NEVER?

MAY 27 - JUNE 12 2012

 Lucie Fontaine Studio

Iaspis, Maria Skolgata 83, Stockholm

Lucie Fontaine and the Romanian Cultural Institute in Stockholm are proud to present the fourth exhibition at Lucie Fontaine’s Stockholm satellite, located at Iaspis, on Maria Skolgata 83. Entitled “What is the reality of never?” the exhibition presents a selection of works by Romanian artist Alex Mirutziu, who for this occasion will perform a new work entitled Five moments of Silence for Pending Work #7 (2012). The performance is accompanied by the following synopsis:

Pending works reside in few answering curves of theory. They are irreducible to any medium and their room is multifaceted and complex. This body of work explores the idea of classicism and the establishment of drama, stressing how the work makes it or doesn’t make it through the play, buffering in the instantaneous present. 

There are two important conceptual triggers related to the pending works machinery. The first question is the reliability of the event and its performativity within a fluctuating timeline. The second refers to the cathexis of time and action versus duration, anti-duration and political evidence. Ultimately the chief interest of the pending works lies in the dialectic between evidence and the event as transformative of each other.

On one hand the artist’s extensive engagement with performance and installations aims to open an ontological terrain inside his so-called “Pending Works and Scotopolitic Objects.” He is the only artist to have made a group with a hyper-object, namely with himself at 29 and exhibit as a collective for the first time at Barbara Seiler Gallery in Zurich. The artist and himself at 29 is a medium. None is superior to the other and none can comprehend the fullness of atoms that shape each other. The biggest question is who arrived at whom first, faster or even at all? The question therefore rests upon distance. Is there any distance separating them? Can there be a possible distance between them, or is the artist at 29 years old collapsing into the artist now? Considering these projects one of the critical aspects in his work is that it resists closure by asking: What is the reality of never?

Alex Mirutziu is an artist based in Sibiu, Romania. He had solo shows at Barbara Seiler Galerie, Zurich (2011), Mihai Nicodim Gallery, Los Angeles (2010), Galerie Rüdiger Schöttle, Munich (2010) and Galeria Sabot, Cluj-Napoca, Romania (2009). His work is included in “European Travelers – Art from Cluj Today,” currently on view at Műcsarnok | Kusthalle Budapest.

The show is made possible through the support of Iaspis and the Romanian Cultural Institute in Stockholm. If you need further information please contact Lucie Fontaine’s employees: employee@luciefontaine.com.

All images and video belong to Alex Mirutziu 

CELEBRATE ZIGGY STARDUST WITH THE QUEEN OF ENGLAND

"Holding hands with The Queen..."

The list of Rock/Pop Stars with knighthood's is long and not very interesting and it's a roll call that David Bowie purportedly declined back in 2003. But, who needs that kind of recognition when you have far more exciting accolades to your name?

There can be no greater seal of Royal approval than an official Royal Mail stamp bearing your name. Sadly, this is not an honour bestowed upon the living, so nobody ever gets to know how it feels, excepting, of course, the creator of the fictional Ziggy Stardust.

That has to be a unique feeling knowing that your photograph is the only example of a living being sharing the same stamp design as Queen Elizabeth II.

As if that wasn't enough, Royal Liz has also decided to celebrate the Ziggy Stardust 40th anniversary day of release by moving the late May bank holiday to June 4th...AND she's making sure that North America is acknowledged too by making the 5th a special bank holiday, the day ZS40 is released there.

No doubt the old bird will celebrate her own Diamond Jubilee which, coincidentally, takes place during the same period. Well we can't begrudge her that.

Meanwhile, for those that haven't seen the full-page press advert for the Ziggy Stardust 40th anniversary release, there it is below along with aforementioned 1st Class Royal Mail stamp...very tasty.

(text taken from official facebook page of the artist)

Inside A B r a n d N e w B a b y C a r r i a g e S t a n d i n g T h e r e o n t h e P o r c h // exhibition

A   B r a n d   N e w   B a b y   C a r r i a g e   S t a n d i n g   T h e r e   o n   t h e   P o r c h

Pauline Bastard, Dina Danish, Rubén Grilo, Shana Lutker, Alex Mirutziu, Uriel Orlow, 

Annaïk Lou Pitteloud, Sebastian Schaub

April 14 – June 02, 2012

“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.

Please contact the gallery for images and further information on the individual artists.

Press release and photos taken from: www.barbaraseiler.ch