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Marko Gutić Mižimakov’s exhibition With this massive hole in the pillow next to my head is a direct continuation of his performance Less than the sum of its parts that condensed a broader artistic exploration into a sci-fi story about two pilots aboard the КОНКОРДИКА spaceship. The story blends various textual fragments such as personal notes, diary entries, or words and thoughts borrowed from other artists; the exhibition contains only fragments of this narrative, while the focus shifts to specific objects that act as traces, reviving bodies, materializing spaces and embedding sound.

Central to the show are lifeless, empty pilot uniforms, with the rigid plastic objects in them hinting at the bodies that might once have worn them. The soft and pliable fabric of the uniforms is marked by shells and shards – scars from the voyage across infinite space and time in the search for the Black Hole at the center of the galaxy. The pilots’ quest for the Black Hole indirectly unravels small histories of AIDS and their trans-generational aftershocks, the collage structure uniting their various real and fictional reflections.

The shells in the installation serve as a conduit that transmits parts of this heterogeneous palimpsest while simultaneously grounding the far-flung galactic points reached during the voyage. The voices in the shells are more than noise; they lure the listeners who hear a frayed fictional travelogue that navigates through collected memories, associations, and visual stimuli. The route charted by the exploration places us, here and now, into an intimate and vulnerable space of a glowing bedroom, both secured and isolated by a metal cage. The bodies have recently left it or are about to return at any moment. (text Lea Vene)

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 via different media and processes of translation. Often borrowing from queer science fiction they see their work as a speculative technology of mutual transformation. They have an MA in Animated Film and New Media from the Academy of Fine Arts in Zagreb. From May 2022 until September 2023 they were an artistic researcher at a.pass. Currently they are an adjunct faculty member at Paris College of Art in the department of Transdisciplinary New Media.
Nurturing their connection with fellow artists, they often collaborates with collectives queerANarchive, KikMelone and DISCOllective, audiovisual artists Nika Pećarina and Karen Nhea Nielsen, and dance artists Sonja Pregrad, Lana Hosni and Marin Lemić.
Their works have been shown, exhibited and performed at The Museum of Contemporary Art Zagreb, V2 Institute for Unstable Media Rotterdam, Center of Contemporary Art Podgorica, City Museum of Ljubljana, The Museum of Contemporary Art Skopje, D2 Kunstraum Leipzig, GMK Zagreb, MKC-Youth Cultural Center Split, Kino Kultura Skopje etc.