Performed by Oran Barak, Harel Grazutis, and Nunzia Picciallo First Performance: Thursday, March 14 at 8 pm
The Center for Contemporary Art Tel Aviv is pleased to announce a new performative work, entitled Bottoms Know It, featured as part of “Gaining in a State of Debt” – the new solo exhibition of Alex Mirutziu (1981, Sibiu, Romania. Lives and works in Cluj-Napoca, Romania). The performance was conceived for CCA Tel Aviv and features three performers and three props.
Alex 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 he expands on the notions of approximation and proximity in connection to time, dislocating modes of arrival at meaning. In his practice he seeks to facilitate a body as ‘turbulent performative occasion’ drawing on the poetic of homelessness, invisibility and beyond, to suspend the set-ups of doing, un-doing, thinking and un-thinking.
Mirutziu’s performances oftentimes grapple with the difficulty of dying, mocking the notions of free will and sensemaking. He is interested in the ethics of depiction debunking idealization of reality by giving a disturbed language to bodies who accept their human limitations and shortcomings. In “Bottoms Know it,” the performers are torn between their will to see the whole, and witnessing of their own neurosis.
The artist describes Bottoms Know It as follows:
The challenge of this project is to give access to a distinct type of knowledge, that of the complicated relationship we have with the other side of textuality. Centered on poetics of readings from behind, hence of openings, entrances, closings, exits, centers, 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. Operations of tight-thinking absorbed by loose activities, squeezed down or stretched out, and disturbed actions by a kind of thinking-as-doing are few of the strategies the performers are using to destabilize the viewer’s judgements and trust in the project itself. 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 the image of power. Dissatisfaction with the present moment could bring further possibilities instead of conflict, as “living” the image of oneself makes disappearance of the self a hard case. Performers oftentimes set in motion half articulations of the self, letting go at times of their own truth, postponing a united image of their individuality to a later stage, haunted by great probability of failure as outcome. The drive toward being good, of stating the bases of everything, destabilizes the present, finding the task of naming of who they are in an insufficient present, a difficult one, prone to fail with every breath.
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