Taste Art! A Multi-Sensory Evening of Eastern European Gems

16/05/2019 @ Romanian Cultural Institute, 1 Belgrave Square, SW1X8PH

We join forces with Contemporary Lynx Magazine, the foreigner’s guide to contemporary art and culture from Poland and Central Europe, for a sensational evening of immersive art and music to celebrate the magazine’s latest issue. The event brings together Romanian performance artist Alex Mirutziu and Polish visual artist Piotr Krzymowski, who will be presenting their latest projects. The evening will be rounded off with a live DJ set offered by Adrian Magrys of Lanquidity Records, who will be playing Eastern European vibes from vinyl.

The event is organised jointly by Contemporary Lynx and the Romanian Cultural Institute, with the support of the Embassy of the Republic of Poland in London and the Polish Cultural Institute. Part of the Polish Heritage Days Festival.

The new issue of Contemporary Lynx Magazine - 1(11)/2019 - focuses on art that impacts all our five senses and its interaction with the viewer. The first step into sensory experience is the lenticular wobbling jelly cover, designed by Sam Bompas and Harry Parr. The issue also includes an article written by Alex Mirutziu, about the vibrant art scene of Cluj-Napoca – a city in central Romania.

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. His work was shown at Royal Academy of Arts and Delfina Foundation (London), Power Plant (Toronto), The Glass Factory Lab (Boda), Mucsarnok Kusthalle (Budapest), Center for Contemporary Art and National Museum (Warsaw), Museum of Contemporary Art (Bucharest), and in 2015 he represented Romania at the Venice Biennale. In his work, Mirutziu 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. His 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 that accept their human limitations and shortcomings. To mark the occasion, the artist will present a video-based work in progress that focuses on 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.

We share over 60 million emojis on social media and send nearly 6 billion in emails or text messages. Emojis become the fastest growing language and one cultivated, perhaps surprisingly, by all generations. Acting as the archivist of our times, Piotr Krzymowski focuses mainly on the digital culture and examines the effects of new technology on everyday activities as well as the resulting shifts in human behaviours. His site-specific installation will feature tens of soft, colourful cushions depicting the emotional icons that usually appear as small, perfect, and round images on the screens of our smartphones, inviting the audience to touch, squeeze and interact with them. The work will address how audience engagement with digital culture can occur offline in a three-dimensional, tangible environment, undermining our distracted and superficial relation with it. Alongside this project, Krzymowski will also present his new series of sculptures that examines various ways in which we engage with our smartphones on a daily basis. Swombies feature glass, mass-produced, mannequin heads filled with dismantled parts of computers, Iphones, internet routers, as well as other electrical gadgets soaked in copper sulphate and sulphuric (battery) acid.

Adrian Magrys is a DJ, promoter, music manager and record collector. Co-owner of Lanquidity Records, a completely independent record label that believes in the power of vinyl to deliver true quality sound like no other medium, he was also project co-ordinator for You Need This: Eastern European Sound (1970-1986), a fine six-track forage through the '70s and '80s archives of Eastern Europe.

When: Thursday 16 May 2019, 7-9pm. Doors open at 6:30pm.
Where: Romanian Cultural Institute, 1 Belgrave Square, SW1X 8PH

Free entry. Please confirm your attendance on EVENTBRITE.