Mihai Lukacs in residence at MQ - August 2013
artist in residence at Museums Quartier in Vienna
Now/mad statement
How did I get here? In which ways have I joined and collaborated and in which ways have I separated or withdrew within the flux of moves and worlds? Following my own experiences with travel, activism, madness, surveillance, detachment, alienation and expansion, I am producing ephemeral works for two partners (one being missed or just an embodiment of a split subject), using what Brian Massumi calls “twoness [as] a relay to a multiplicity”. My experiences separate and mingle in a chronological interaction based on the visual and written archives from the time I experimentally moved from one location to another. A mediatised experience crossing imaginary worlds occurs while simultaneously the nomadic move is made across physical borders. The disorientation and flexibility caused by neoliberal capitalism affect and excite the psychological processes that are crucial to counter a dominant discourse of “progress”, “free market” and “borderless” space. By being at every step a relay away from fixed ideas into direct action and performance, my strategy is to analyse and reinvent a nomadic archive of political possibility and becoming. “Now/mad” is a migrant walk in the Sigmund Freud Park that focuses on a personal experience of nomadism, precarity and performative explorations of hysterical subjectivities.
Mihai Lukacs (b. 1980) is a theoretician, researcher, activist, performer and stage director, based in Bucharest. He has a background in feminist theory, queer theory, stage directing, theatre studies and psychoanalysis. His research and art practice focuses on food politics, inter-subjectivity, materiality, hysteria, femininity, the posthuman, failure, global inequalities and the relation between migration and mental health.
