view images

Over the past three years, Marko Gutić Mižimakov has developed a science-fiction queer travelogue that follows two pilots on a journey into a black hole. Previously realized across text and performance, soon to be a film, this distorted narrative uses the black hole as a conceptual framework to explore untold histories, lost information, and unspoken desires.

The outlines of a spacecraft are glimpsed through the window of the artist’s Brussels bedroom, which overlooks the Galerie de la Reine, a shopping arcade with a lattice glass-and-iron vault roof. This passage transforms into the spaceship Konkordika, embarking on a voyage toward Sagittarius A*, the black hole at our galaxy’s center. Artificially tinted light bathes the intimate interior that appears eerie in the afternoon and evening. The echoes of random passersby generate communication noise, a grainy soundscape giving out damaged and incomplete information.

At the center of the gallery space, a metal cage mirroring the structure of the shopping arcade protects a sculptural rendering of a private interior. A room with an open window and a bed still bearing impressions quietly testify to bodies that have recently left. Blue light from outside suspends the scene in a space-time vacuum. The two protagonists remain unseen, present only as a negative: hollow bodies whose contours are suggested by openings in their pilot uniforms. These gaps function as vulnerable points – sites of privilege, risk, and exposure – but also as passages through which absence is inscribed. Fragile casts, multiplied through duplication, evoke a moment frozen in time, an unstable sequence of presence that simultaneously coalesces and dissolves.  The curvature of space and time is further emphasized by the wall ornaments, in which multiple misaligned ribbons unfold into a constellation resembling Sagittarius.

Between private interiors and cosmic void, these elements of a broader narrative imagine a galactic displacement of queer subjects whose temporalities are fractured and unstable. Yet, their vulnerability is empowering because it enables forms of communication that transcend conventional time and space. Intimate stories and micro-histories marked by the trans-generational trauma of AIDS travel from the threshold of space to the control room. This repressed history, impossible to tell, affirms their fragmented, deferred, and persistent absence through sensory experience. Materialized as noise, fragment, or trace of light, they continue to inhabit the present. (text Lovro Japundžić)

Marko Gutić Mižimakov is a performance, animation and text based artist, exploring ways of shaping sensory materials through intimate, collaborative and social processes. They took part in the artistic research programme a.pass in Brussels (2022–2023) and taught at Paris College of Art (2022–2025); they currently work as an external associate at the Academy of Fine Arts in Zagreb. Their performances, films and installations have been presented at various international exhibitions and festivals, including 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. Their work has been recognised with awards including Zlatna Lubenica and the DENES Award, as well as a nomination for the Croatian Theatre Award.