Intervention is Enough Evidence. Finally.

2023 / Technology of ephemeral reciprocity / Kunsthalle Praha, Prague - in the exhibition “Lost in the Moment That Follows. The Ovidiu Șandor Collection” | curator: Tevž Logar

Accepting the limitations of our ability to establish facts, this performance investigates the possibilities for acting on them subjectively, with intervention serving as the primary operation. The performers set about inventing strategic practices to retain or improve their uniqueness, switching between voice recordings, words, and frozen images of past actions, catering to the 'instinct for business' in an attempt to align aims with outcomes. As the performers interact, a unique temporality is created by withholding beliefs and real emotions. A maze of introspections frequently collides with a terrifying incapacity to de-intervene, de-act, or de-realize, jeopardizing the integrity of their own identities.

The dancers acquire importance through each action that impacts behavior. This results in an environment that gradually takes on the characteristics of negotiation and detachment from the constraints of time and location. Their primary objective isn't conveying something specific, just as they can't fully control the moment of their expression. Instead, the focus is on transcending their individual limitations by engaging in actions that involve change, redirection, and expansion.

They engage in envisioning solutions before realizing them, striving to align their desires and needs. The central focus is on identifying behaviors that make them feel alive, and these actions are self-generated rather than imposed from outside. Finally, it highlights the complexity of these interactions, showcasing ambivalences and tensions as essential aspects of trust and shared experiences.

In this performance I delve into the concept of intervention as a form of evidence, suggesting that understanding the experiences of others often requires interference and action. I argue that the normalization of unmet desires leads to a cycle of interventions, creating and solving problems. This performance aims to explore human desire in light of our dissatisfaction with the complexities of existence.

Performers: Lukáš Zahy, Eva Urbanová, Marta Blašková

The Urgency of the Idea of Closure in Drawing (TAH29)

2023 / performed at Cazarma U, Timisoara - in the exhibition “Spark in the Dark” | curators: Nathalie Hoyos, Rainald Schumacher

The artist, forty-one, is holding a graphite and plaster mask of his face, which was taken when he was 29. The graphite transfer from the mask to the paper is carefully steered in order not to render the mask recognizable, but rather to provide another access to representation that is materialistic in approach. To accomplish this, the mask is treated as both a tool and a model. I have a mental image of the mask touching the paper in accordance with the actual mark on the paper. The challenge is to harmonize the mental image of the mask with its hard materiality.

Artistul, în vârstă de patruzeci și unu de ani, ține în mână o mască de grafit și ipsos a feței sale, realizată când avea 29 de ani. Transferul de grafit de pe mască pe hârtie este ghidat cu grijă pentru a nu face masca recunoscută, ci pentru a oferi o altă abordare materialistă a reprezentării. Pentru a realiza acest lucru, masca este tratată atât ca un instrument, cât și ca un model. Artistul are o imagine mentală a muchiilor care ating, provocarea constând în a armoniza imaginea mentală a măștii cu propria ei materialitatea.

Photos by Vlad Candea

Towards Exiting a Fold

2020 / performed at Kunstahalle Bega, Timisoara - in the exhibition ”The Meaning of Sculpture” | curator: Liviana Dan

[EN] "Towards exiting a fold” opens up to the politics of human disqualification, self-annihilation, and the dissolution inner boundaries as means to connect to one’s actual life. It questions to what degree distancing from our fecal existence denudes the grasp of one’s humanity, locking in a body that is porous, difficult to contain and establish its own integrity. Finally it looks at how sexuality has been permanently altered by the body’s capacity to change the things for which it was once made for and how what it feels right can change one’s perspective of what’s socially accepted.

[RO] “Towards exiting a fold” dramatizează politicile descalificării, ale auto-anihilării și ale disoluției egou-ului ca mijloace de ancorare în propria existentă. Performance-ul chestionează măsura în care racordarea la propriile excreții demontează înțelegerea pe care o avem asupra propriei umanități, fixând un corp poros, a cărui integritate e greu de întreținut. În cele din urmă problematizează alterarea sexualității prin modalitatea corpului de a-și schimba misiunea inițială și cum atunci când operezi așa cum simți poți modifica ceea ce e stereotipal acceptat.

Doing sub Thinking

2020 / performed at Concrete - The Yard, Alserkal Avenue, part of Quoz Arts Festival, Dubai

Doing Sub Thinking wants to expose what may come across as being implicit but unnoticed in our social lives, which is not necessarily a feature of truth making. Operations of tight thinking absorbed by loose activities squeezed down or stretched out actions disturbed by a kind of thinking as doing are few strategies the performers are using to destabilise the viewer’s judgements and trust in the project.

Surveilling how spaces for mental withdrawal bring out conflicts between what the individual wants and what is already present the performers oftentimes set in motion half-articulations which can create dissatisfaction with the present but bring about further possibilities, through a normalisation of doubt or letting go of something that must be solved at a later time or re-imagined with a great probability of failure, throughout the process.

Bye Bye, Hello…

2019 / performed at Centrul de Interes, Cluj-Napoca

The challenge of this performance is to give access to a distinct type of knowledge, that of the complicated relationship we have with our assholes. Centred on the poetics of anality, hence of openings, entrances, closings, exits, centres, 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.

Placing the out of place

2019 / performed at Palace of Culture and Science / Warsaw Gallery Weekend

Photo: Karolina Zajaczkowska

When working with the mental projection of the physical boundaries of the body in stasis a fragmented perception of the human posture is continually recycled in its graphic representation on paper. The artist tries to inscribe in a graphic form the mechanisms of the body’s place within voluntary and involuntary moves acknowledging the body’s materialisation between what is perceived of the body’s posture as modification and what is monstrous within it. The end game of this attempt is to establish a kind of truth of form without directly looking at it, and to allow a certain out of place mentality get involved as tools to disrupt the physicality of the status quo back and forth.

Bottoms Know It

2019 / performed at CCA — Center for Contemporary Art, Tel Aviv

Performers: Harel Grazutis, Oran Barak, Nunzia Picciallo

The challenges of this project is to give access to a distinct type of knowledge, that of the complicated relationship we have with our assholes. Centred on the poetics of anality, hence of openings, entrances, closings, exits, centres, 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. It takes inspiration from Iris Murdoch’s notion of the Good, hence of seeing the whole thing and expands on Leo Bersani’s cultural construction of masculinity and power. In “Bottoms Know it,” the performers are torn between the will to see the whole thing and being the witnesses of there own neurosis.

The Gaze is a Prolapse Dressed in Big Business

2018 / performed at Frac Pays de la Loire, Nantes - in the exhibition ”Manufacturing Nature / Naturalising the Synthetic” | curator: Diana Marincu

“The Gaze is a Prolapse Dressed in Big Business” is a performance concerned with the notion of the gaze which detaches one from its environment. It accepts the nature of looking at the world but not seeing it, affected by off the shelf accessible presets matured as the look itself, undermining the ethics of depiction and of use. The gaze is a metaphor for reaching out, implying a passive-active dichotomy, a political protraction of the body as well as being cultural and historical biased, a way of looking from the inside, through data, which is apolitical in nature but profit driven. One always wants to get something out of the gazed. Both types of gazes are tailored by a specific time and place, which can moreover be activated with closed eyes, a method used throughout the live improvisation. It follows that a view from nowhere is out of the question as there is no such thing as an outside, not anymore.

In order to escape the hinges of ‘profit-making’ instrumented by a robbing eye I put the brakes on its fanatic objectification by rejecting the horizontal gaze responsible for productivity, anxiety, and most importantly for the mirroring of the self. Tapping on notions of autonomy, identity and non-identity, that which is inseparable from the rest, and on the capacity to become ‘other’, this performance embraces the vertical gaze, and dwells on evaluations of topological situations as an inescapable political consciousness, of the here bellow point of view. The live improvisation is triggered from the very beginning by an exclusive, divided gaze which champions the here/bellow space and the above space within the grand narrative of the grid referencing the Nazi propaganda and the notion of the corner window of Frank Lloyd Wright which acts as a stage where the performer engages in a process of on-going expulsion of the unwanted, the unusable standing by the notion of vegetal immanence as an ontological medium.

The Urgency of the Idea of Closure in Drawing (TAH29)

2018 / performed at Kunstverein Ost - KVOST Berlin in the exhibition ”Around the Truth is the Truth”

The artist, thirty-six, is holding a graphite and plaster mask of his face, which was taken when he was 29. The graphite transfer from the mask to the paper is carefully steered in order not to render the mask recognizable, but rather to provide another access to representation that is materialistic in approach. To accomplish this, the mask is treated as both a tool and a model. I have a mental image of the mask touching the paper in accordance with the actual mark on the paper. The challenge is to harmonize the mental image of the mask with its hard materiality.

Doing sub Thinking

2018 / Performance commissioned by Block Universe Festival in collaboration with Delfina Foundation and European Art East Foundation - Royal Academy of Arts, London

Performers: Ekin Bernay, Rowdy_SS, Jenn Vogtle

The Urgency of the Idea of Closure in Drawing (TAH29)

2018 / Art on Stage, Art Safari, Bucharest | curator: Herve Mikailoff

EN:
The artist at 36 holds in his hand a graphite life-mask taken in Sweden when he was 29, and attempts to use it as an instrument to make sense of a previous material representation of his face. The mask is corrupted due to past attempts of drawing with it, in a chase to suspend meaning, and relentlessly question closure and resolution even for a brief moment. The artist and Himself at 29 makes use of 'bastard’ or 'homeless lines’ to allow the form to surface from repeated impressions, drawing the mask by proximity and not by faithful marking.

RO:
Artistul la 36 de ani ţine în mână o mască facială din grafit realizată în Suedia la vârsta de 29 de ani şi încearcă să o folosească pe post de instrument pentru a putea înţelege o reprezentare materială anterioară a feţei sale. Masca este coruptă în urma încercărilor precedente de a desena cu ea, într-o cursă de captare a sensului şi de punere la îndoială în mod necontenit a ideii de împăcare şi soluţionare chiar şi pentru un scurt moment. Artistul şi El însuşi la 29 de ani foloseşte ‘linii bastarde’ sau ‘fara loc’ pentru a-i permite formei să se nască din repetatele impresii, desenând masca prin apropiere şi nu printr-un marcaj fidel.

Dignity to the Unsaid

2017 / National Museum of Contemporary Art, Bucharest

Work commissioned by BIDFF (Bucharest International Dance Film Festival), supported by National Museum of Contemporary Art Bucharest and Sabot Gallery.

Word workers: Alex Popa, Irina Sibef, Cosmin Stanila

Causal Variantions for This, Like... -- Elias Merino

- all photos by Doria Photography with the exception of the last the last in grid, bearing the copyright of Alex Mirutziu .

"Dignity to the unsaid" is the second project with reference to the novelist and philosopher, Iris Murdoch. The crux of this performance and film questions to what degree peripheral thoughts, sidelines, quasi operations of making meaning rise to the surface to anchor someone who confronts Alzheimer’s decease. In the two instances of the project, the three performers consciously embrace dodgy closures, wrongly wired communication, and corrupted memories of their own and of Iris Murdoch’s own. The goal is to create a mental setup, to reflect on the things which are left unsaid by choice and by disease, exposing what it might have felt like to slowly fade away, grow small, and live a posthumous life.

- Alex Mirutziu

The performance includes the sound installation CAUSAL VARIATIONS FOR SOMETHING LIKE (computer-generated sound, 3 x multichannel audio), created by Elías Merino, a series of autonomous synthetic sound objects based on a relational tissue involving sound and human actors within Alex Mirutziu’s performance frame. These sound entities are located/(un)located in the physical space hidden behind a mirrored appearance. Plasticity, non human dynamic entity, synthesis, irreducibility, discreteness, no objected, relation, ecology, temporal elasticity, rifts, disembodiment, algorithmic, sound sculpture, articulation, reductionism, structural gesture, permutation gesture, variation, no hierarchy, physicality, process of coexistence, miscommunication.

Short presentation of Iris Murdoch:

With the loss of Virginia Wolf and the decline of Evelyn Waugh and Graham Greene, British fiction after 1945 looked moribund. In 1954 three new writers — William Golding, Kingsley Amis and Iris Murdoch — published first novels that changed the literary climate. All become important: Golding won the Nobel Prize, Amis gained a knighthood, Murdoch become a Dame of the British Empire.

In the 1950s they were figures of irreverence, anger and and existential anxiety. Murdoch’s Under the Net was a picaresque story set in London and Bohemian Paris. It had a British sense of humour and dry Irish wit. It was also a language game, flavoured with the existentialism of Sartre and the linguistic philosophy of Wittgenstein.

Unusually in Britain Murdoch was a philosopher-novelist. Born in Dublin of Anglo-Irish background, she had grown up in suburban London, attended Badminton girls school and then studied classics at Oxford, the academic city where she spent much of her life.

Murdoch took the novel seriously, more so than most writers. Her famous 1961 essay, ‘Against Dryness’, defined its a ‘fit house for free characters to live in’. The novel was there not to convey abstract ideas or philosophies, nor to form symbolic shapes or offer lazy consolations. It was about character and freedom, and dealt with the reality of human figures in their emotional and moral lives.

Tribute to Iris Murdoch — novelist and philosopher

by Malcolm Bradbury

(fragments taken from a text originally published in Times Magazine, on 22 February 1999)

How Soon Gone is Gone

2016 / Wexford Arts Centre, Wexford, Ireland

'A posthumous letter to Iris Murdoch, one of 20th century’s brilliant minds, who after ‘resolving’ the present, was left out of it, unable to engineer the faculties of her mind in her struggle with Alzheimer’s disease.'

(performed as The Artist and Himself at 29)

Stay[s] against confusion

2016 / (with Joshua Hubbard), Delfina Foundation, London

"Stay [s] against confusion" looks at the relationship between Etc., accumulation, and evidence in live performance, knowing that the space after something ends is a real problem for the audience.

Etc. is fuckcontext—suspends the production of meaning and stops superfluous text from leaking. In other words, Etc. is like eating chewing gum. The structure of this performance operates between "New Transport" — the digital adaptation of the Transport lettering originally designed by Jock Kinneir and Margaret Calvert in the 1960s, specifically for use on the United Kingdom’s new motorways and all-purpose roads, and selected texts by American poet Graham Foust, "a virtuoso of the apparently offhand, the anecdotal, and the everyday," as Maureen N. McLane once wrote. The score sheets have multiple technical specifications on the level of the design of the letterfaces, like the distance between stems, curves, and angles where lines meet on the page, with the purpose of enacting a type of reading through dance, mapping literature which has shape precisely due to the invisibility of typefaces and looking at how the cerebral cortex negotiates the notion of Etc. between looking and reading. 'Stay [s] against confusion’ asks the audience to both look and read the performance, and in the transition between these two modes, we experience Etc.

The Finnish Method

2015 / The New Gallery of the Romanian Institute for Culture and Research in Humanities, Venice

(part of Romanian representation at Venice Biennale)

The notion of ontological design is confronted in The Finnish Method. The result of the design of things is movement. A diagram drawn on the floor and on the table within a Finnish working station (table, chair, lamp, separator) indicates the most efficient energy-saving protocol of actions which enable a fluent, dance-like economy of steps which Finnish product designers acknowledge as having a positive and productive impact on daily tasks. I am consciously following the steps and connective bridges between them, and during the continuous routine of walking towards, sitting down, and engaging in minute activities, I ignore the diagram and pay attention to how missteps and inefficient biomechanics interfere, causing micro-stresses in the body and finally changing my behaviour.

Scotopolitic Object #2 for five performers and electroacoustic impromptu

2014 / The Centre for Contemporary Art Ujazdowski Castle in Warsaw

(in collaboration with Elias Merino)

Traditional Romanian vases, fitted with condenser microphones, are used by five performers to create an interactive performance. Meanwhile, sound designer/composer/musician Elias Merino is working to balance and manage the echoes created by the amplified microphones, picking up the noise inputs created by the artists' hands moving over open end vases. By depicting the challenge of sustaining a steady sound frequency, the output alludes to the changing natures of life's continuity, which is perpetually on the verge of collapsing, camouflaging beneath and adjacent to other sound generating frequencies.

Scotopolitic Objects #2 for one performer

2013 / Sabot Gallery, Cluj-Napoca

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Camp-Festival

2013 / Cluj-Napoca

Five moments of silence for Pending Work #7

2012 / IASPIS, Stockholm

Interview through sculpture

2012 / Vault Gallery, Prato

History is nothing but muscles in action

2011 / (with Razvan Sadean), ZDB - Galeria Zé dos Bois, Lisbon

Over the past decades various problematics that touched on notions of time, historicity and action, had been thrown into a whirlpool of complex practices within the landscape of art and theory. As performers we both approached our research focused on anatomical legitimation of action from a performative jurisdiction, and engage in an economic use of muscles as the principle at work, to be able to define an action, and establish its time relevance. The main question arises — how many muscles one has to use so to speak to be fully engaged in reality, to establish the now of an action? In this piece, we payed attention to the simple act of looking at each other sufficient enough to document a true form of love confined by time. In the nowness, looking at each other is all we can do, as the now-now is so instantaneous as to be practically non-existent. (location: Palácio de Santa Catarina)

Action is guilt - method to Rourke

2010 / Studio Corte17, Prato

Critique on how temples move faster than their shadows

2010 / Mihai Nicodim Gallery, Los Angeles

When love melted cavalries in our hearts

2010 / Eira 33, Lisbon

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. A constructed metaphor for the staticism of love.