As part of the WHW film program, at Kino Kinoteka, we welcome Marko Mižimakov. 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.

 We will present excerpts from the video installation Thank You for Being Here with Me (in collaboration with Karen Nhea Nielsen, LilySlava8 & AmpersandG8, 2020) and the recent film Dragon Hunt (2024, 17′ 29”), which recently garnered significant attention by winning the MMSU Rijeka award at the 37th Youth Salon (curated by Lovro Japundžić 2024). The film has been showcased at various film festivals and exhibitions in Croatia, Belgium, Slovenia, France, the United States, China, Colombia, Canada, Romania, and Serbia. Once again, we will have the opportunity to experience this experimental, dance-driven, queer road film, inspired by the science fiction novel Stars in My Pocket Like Grains of Sand by Samuel R. Delany.

Following the screening, an informal conversation will explore topics including collaborative processes, personal preoccupations, queerness, science fiction, performance, poetry, care, and desire.

“I am interested in cultivating forms of communal intimacy, so when pulling from this wide stream of worlds I am simultaneously seeking a possibility for their narration back into the milieu I reside in. Using experimental means to register emergent entanglements of desire-history-body-technolgy I want to  look into what Vinciane Despret calls narrative matrices – narrations that solicit other stories and cause them to branch off.  I am invested in these non-linear, open-ended, experimental approaches to narration, analyses and material devising for their ability to interrupt straight time, and guide the senses towards the perceivable and more-than-perceivable. This methodology is one that at once describes and produces a feeling of what it is described – functioning through the sensual and the critical faculties concurrently.” MGM

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Marko Gutić Mižimakov (1992) is a visual, performance and text based artist. 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.

 The conversation is part of the Care Ecologies: New Alliances program, supported by the Croatian Audiovisual Centre/HAVC, the City Office for Culture and Civil Society and Kultura Nova Foundation.