With guest artist Razvan Sadean

The work of Romanian artist Alex Mirutziu (1981, Sibiu, RO) cuts across multiple domains, including writing, performance, photography and video installations. His work interrogates social processes with ephemeral emergence, using reference beyond itself and abduction of indexes as main constructs in an attempt to reconfigure the relation between information and form, psychophysical language and content, challenging origins and meaning.

Meow Gallery: The gallery is empty.

“My work traverses processes that refer to the body when it is at war with itself; addresses issues of self- familiarization, mediation, and interaction, framed via social processes and ephemeral emergence. I never forget that I use revolution wise instruments embedded with political meaning and transversal power; my body is one of those instruments – my own disposal container where I am comfortable in stepping in and on my own obscenity, and ambiguity, as self destructive volume, as public duration of images, processual, exercising freedom in complex environments. I intend to make use of the processes of the body almost to a level of rape, to generate distinctions and to create meaning when introduced into new systems of relations.”

My work is a shared provocation of corruptive language, comes into view as exploitative act of how death has structured us, as I sing for the war of heartbreak where every bit of myself is a tool, a weapon.” (Excerpts from: Hot Mess, Contemplating the body at war with itself. Some brief remarks on my own mess, by Alex Mirutziu)

His most recent work implies a recuperation of the subject between structured death and migration of suffering. “In recent times, my work opened up fields of discussion embedded with what I call ideological practices allocated by culture, practices that lie in the verb status of art – in its immediacy, and ability to generate meaning and information within difference, between actuality and potentiality, between what is seen and what is said, what is done and what can be done – questioning how ideas are affected by the contexts in which they are produced.

Following up components of communication, my work moves outward and inward in a kind of romantic discursive model questioning its purpose and its uselessness, being left as poetic and imaginative space, as a space for possibility and potentiality – poetic because each form captures a fragment of the world and, by referring to each other, creates a pure event. I am interested in articulations and half articulations of the idea of art as a structure in relation to its contemplation taken as an architectural act, juxtaposed to time and language. This body of work traces the degree to which one revisits emptiness, and certain particular cognitive operations of what memory does to thought and its shadow.” (Excerpts from: Spending time in relation to usage, by Alex Mirutziu).

For his first exhibition in Switzerland, titled “Spending time in relation to usage”, Alex Mirutziu has invited his partner Razvan Sadean (1987, Sfantu Gheorghe, RO) as guest artist. Razvan Sadean’s oeuvre includes speculative protocols of writing and juxtaposes the conceptual nature of theatre as information that morphs between the web, photography and literature. This marks the first collaboration between the two artists and will be accompanied by a small publication.

Performances and works by Alex Mirutziu have been exhibited in outside of Romania in Spain, Great Britain, Germany, Italy and the United States. In 2008, he received the Best Independent Artist Award for his video work “Tears are precious” at the International Festival of Video Art Optica.

The show opens on Friday, January 14, 2011 with a live performance by Alex Mirutziu, which will start at 7 pm.