2009, performance, hybrid installation with objects and video, 45 min
Questioning depiction, technology and dissent, 2009 uses the argument, the practice of persuasion, as theatrical device. Countering two pervasive tropes, the dystopic proclamation of the futility of critique and the moral economy of boastfully recognising that which “does not count”, the work culminates in a filmically figured defence of “critique”, two dialectical backflips apart from both cynicism and moralism. Drawing contours around social antagonism, its failures and contagion, we want to know what moves us to action or locks us in place.
The performance is organised around wilfully grouped items, each guiding act and address. Clustered portraits of public figures sourced from memory sit alongside a still life of objects refracted through a mirrored sphere: a horseshoe crab from an island off the US East Coast, donated box residues of antiretroviral therapy, a bovine hipbone, a wig block moulded from a parent’s head. The objects exist in a material time caught up in social relations of power and reproduction which evade us.
A rendering of a nameless cityscape in aeropittura style further choreographs the space. Speed and altitude break down into dream-like forms of “the future”. Fetishising bird’s-eye view seeking to represent representation as such, for the Italian futurists, aeropittura was to impress its viewers: look what technology can do! 2009 borrows this disputed backdrop for a final call to action.
We treat the long first decade of the twenty-first century as a memorable epoch, a coming-of-age story of sorts, today distant enough to return as a problem and demand interpretation. Looking back we ask how we became available to the popular forms that now organise us.
Marko Gutić Mižimakov is a visual, performance and text-based artist living between Brussels and Zagreb. They are interested in shaping sensory materials through intimate, collaborative and social processes. In their work, bodies – as well as digital and palpable objects – are animated, choreographed and sung into non-orientable forms, carried there by different media and processes of translation. Their works have been exhibited, screened and performed at The Museum of Contemporary Art Zagreb, Beursschouwburg Brussels, V2 Institute for Unstable Media Rotterdam, Ostrale Biennale Dresden, Antimatter BC, City Museum of Ljubljana, The Museum of Contemporary Art Skopje, D21 Kunstraum Leipzig, Galerija Močvara Zagreb and Galerija Nova Zagreb, among others.
Stefa Govaart is an artist based in Brussels working across dance, performance and theory. Collaborative in nature, their work probes the stakes of “critique” today, as well as the performer’s “function” in light of the cultural field’s variety of forms of institutionalisation (from DIY to high-end). Their solo work Duplicity Willing, Cantate (2025) premiered at Les Urbaines (Lausanne, CH) last December. With Bryana Fritz and Chloe Chignell, they are the author of BEGIN/The Mirror (2024). Further recent and current collaborators include Marko Gutić Mižimakov, Osamu Shikichi, Marija Cetinić and Bojana Cvejić. Govaart holds MA’s in Performance Studies (New York University) and Cultural Analysis (University of Amsterdam), having previously studied writing and performance theory at P.A.R.T.S.
Credits:
Performance and text: Marko Gutić Mižimakov & Stefa Govaart
Video and objects: Marko Gutić Mižimakov