Alex Mirutziu (1981, Romania) was a guest of Outset Bialik Residency during March 2019. During his residency Mirutziu prepared his solo exhibition "Gaining in a State of Debt", presented at The Center for Contemporary Art, Tel Aviv, curated by Nicola Trezzi.
"Gaining in a State of Debt" was the first solo exhibition by Romanian artist Alex Mirutziu (1981, Sibiu, Romania. Lives and works in Cluj-Napoca, Romania).
Mirutziu’s practice extends over a wide range of media and activities, including sculpture, drawing, poetry, and performance, as well as critical and curatorial projects. In his work, which is both highly intellectual and deeply physical, he expands the notions of approximation and proximity in connection to time, presenting "dislocated modes of arrival at meaning." In his modus operandi, he seeks to facilitate the understanding of the body as a "turbulent performative occasion" – drawing on the poetics of homelessness and invisibility. Through his artworks, he looks at ways of suspending the set-ups of doing and un-doing, thinking and un-thinking. Alongside TAH29 (The Artist Himself at 29), he acts within a collective body whose modus operandi is "retroactive irony."
His exhibition at CCA Tel Aviv featured a new performative work, entitled Bottoms Know It, and a compilation of videos that contextualise the new work and at the same time open up new avenues of understanding. Conceived for CCA Tel Aviv and featuring three performers and three props, Bottoms Know It exposed what may come across as being implicit but unnoticed, which is not necessarily a feature of truth-making.
Through the combination of different streams of thoughts and informed by philosophical concepts that are always personalised and freely interpreted, the artist is capable of creating time-based and durational experiences between himself and the viewer, using the artwork – whether in the form of an object or a body (his own or somebody else’s) – as a channel, a catalyst, a sort of remote controller that is linking two individuals, himself and the viewer, possibly located in two different geographical and time zones. However, all the aforementioned notions never come as we usually expect them: "time-based" should be considered according to an unusual notion of time; "durational" should be perceived according to a larger scope of perception. The work of Alex Mirutziu not only makes us think, it also makes us think about the conditions allowing us to think, and un-think, to do, and un-do.
ON VIEW: 13th March - 17th April 2019
