Mihai Gui was born in 1989, in Cluj-Napoca, Romania and graduated in 2016 with an MA from AKV St.Joost in Breda, The Netherlands. He is a recipient of the Mondriaan Fund for Young Talent stipend in 2017. Within his own artistic practice, he focuses on questioning the established value of art in contemporary society and ask “WHAT can art DO?” and “WHY must art DO?” With these questions in mind, Mihai likes to engage multiple lines of research on particular subjects through smaller projects, and then use the knowledge gained from these to periodically research into bigger, more encompassing endeavors. He is currently either working on a personal project, or on a commission, or learning how to do something new and exciting, or all of the above.
VR living in the Wielewaal - An interactive VR documentary/experience set in the Wielewaal neighborhood in Rotterdam presented as seen by its inhabitants. The project follows 7 different neighbors and their relationship to their homes, asking them to reflect on various aspects of their life in the neighborhood. Audiences get to walk around a scale model of the neighborhood, discover the general area and its history, move from house to house, explore the insides and what makes these houses someone's own individual home and have a 1-on-1 discussion with each person based on an existing interview framework.
Solid Maybe - A collaboration with choreographer Marijke de Vos in which I shot and produced a short film that was then projection-mapped on location next to a live dance performance. The piece ran over three weeks in both Rotterdam and Dordrecht.
VR living in Roffa - The project employed Virtual Reality to create an interactive archive places that were, sometimes literally, bulldozed over in the name of further developing the city of Rotterdam. In it I focused on one neighborhood - the Tweebosbuurt - reconstructed as it had been inhabited for decades at the same time as it was in the process of being completely demolished in real-life. Presented in VR alongside this was a guiding narration from one of its former inhabitants, Mustapha.
Teddy shouldn’t smoke - A second short movie based on a collaboration with choreographer Marijke de Vos. This particular iteration came at the end of a four-day residency and focused on creating new dance material around the theme of anxiety disorders. For this project I directed, filmed and edited the piece as I researched lighting techniques that can convey a feeling of finding oneself in an artificial and uncanny reality.
VR who we are – Pavlov street - The outcome of a four day residency for research and development of new work, with a presentation date on the 25th of April during the TimeWindow TestFest. The research focused on developing VR cityscapes based on real-life locations, and how to create a storyline that guides audiences through these.
VR who we are - “VR who we are” is an interactive VR installation aimed at exploring the creative process of the artists that took part in the Summer Sessions this year. By virtually rebuilding real-life land- and city-scapes relating to each of the participating makers in the Unreal game engine, Mihai opens up these spaces and associated past moments to an interactive scrutiny. He then navigates these environments together with the makers exploring how each one draws their respective creative processes from these points in space and time, while simultaneously recording these experiences. This material is then used to create a stand-alone experience that an audience can navigate independently and through which they can explore the multiple red-threads of the artists' practices with them narrating their memories, thoughts and impressions. This project was produced as part of the Summer Sessions Network for Talent Development in a co-production of V2_ Lab for the Unstable Media, and supported also by CBK Rotterdam.
GROTESQUE INTERCHANGEABLE FIGUREHEADS - An audio/video project based on found footage accompanied by lenticular prints. Within the growing allied right-wing popular movements gaining traction across Europe (and not only) there as many dangerous consistencies in their discourses as there are perilous discrepancies amongst individual agendas. The aim of the project is to highlight this through the languages of glitch-art and movie making.
Coarse on language - Another iteration of the "I hate you all welcome!" project in which the spotlight was set on more subtle aspects of dutch culture: attitudes, miscommunication, double entendres and Marktplaats for some reason… Although different in content, this second phase was also envisioned as a means to discuss attitudes around refugees, asylum seekers and migrants in relation to our own identities while also providing a real language teaching experience.
I hate you all welcome! - A multimedia project including audio, video and text (and unexpectedly intolerant fortune cookies). This project stems from an idea to try and teach people Dutch by using hate-speech as study material; to repurpose it as something useful: a tool for reflecting on identity and integration. In 2016 I used myself as a case study to create an initial course (I hate you all welcome!) based on right-wing discourses and ultranationalist rhetoric since, as a migrant, these also applied to me.
CATastrophical - An A5 photobook consisting of pictures of cats I took over the past years, and an associated word containing the three letters “CAT”.
