©SABOT 2023


FILM PROGRAM: ALEX MIRUTZIU

June 1st - July 14th, 2012

screening of the 2010-12 performances

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.