Mihai Toth in conversation with Raluca Paraschiv
Interview with Mihai Toth about his participation in the emergent co-lab project and the „Interspace” exhibition at MV SCI-ART Center
Raluca Paraschiv: Emergent coLab, organized by MV Sci-Art with the financial support of the Timișoara Center for Projects, aimed to support emerging Timișoara-based artists, such as Mihai Toth, Ana Maria Szollosi, Mirela Cerbu, Tudor Mutrescu, and Sânziana Gheorghe, through mentorship from figures such as Liliana Mercioiu-Popa, Călin Man, Radu Radoslav, Mirela Stoeac-Vlăduți, and Grațian Gâldău, while developing an experimental art education program inspired by the interdisciplinary and egalitarian principles of the Sigma group, fostering collaboration between artists, scientists, and the public through exhibitions such as ”Interspace” open between 16.08 – 14.09.24, workshops, and innovative pedagogical initiatives.
In the framework of this project, I had a discussion with Mihai Toth at the opening of the exhibition and asked him to describe the working sessions with the last three mentors:
Mihai Toth: Professor Radu Radoslav was the city’s chief architect and shared his experience, and Grațian Gâldău collaborated with him at some point. A young graduate in the 1990’s, Gâldău engaged in various social experiments, involving performative interventions in public spaces. There was a strong performative energy in that time that he was a part of. Grațian shared certain stories he had gathered, along with an archive of images and a few videos, which he presented to us. These sparked collective discussions.
Following this, Mirela Stoeac-Vlăduți spoke about the artist-curator relationship, steering the discussion toward exhibitions curated by artists themselves – the artist as curator. She mentioned Marcel Duchamp, who often promoted his friends more than his own work; we know of his friendship with Brâncuși and many other artists of that time. Naturally, she also referred to Thomas Hirschhorn, an artist working in the realm of social art. Hirschhorn’s public space installations often involve everyday people with regular jobs, blending life with art and art with life in a unique way, showing how the two intertwine.
RP: You had an interesting role in the project, didn’t you? Can you tell me more about why experimental models of pedagogy interest you and what you see as their significance? What are your thoughts on the importance of research in an artistic practice, and how do you approach it in your own work and in the exhibition „Interspace”?
MT: I was invited to shift my role, let’s say, from being an early-career artist to presenting a topic to my peers. I focused on the idea of artistic research and the way that behind any artistic intervention lies a practice, a process, and research in itself. I delved into the concept of experimental schools, such as the ”Institut des Hautes Études en Arts Plastiques” (IHEAP), which operated in Paris from 1985 to 1995. This institution experimented in a unique way—students were paid, had access to studios, and were free to organize their spaces as they wished, without traditional studio visits from professors. What was emphasized instead was the presentation—a kind of artist talk. This institution was pioneering in promoting artist talks, where artists describe their practice to an audience.
I also mentioned Dorothea Rockburne, who had studied at Black Mountain College and approached art from the perspective of mathematical principles. She later taught the concept of “artistic mathematics”, demonstrating how geometry and calculations could lead to visual compositions. I also brought up John Cage and his experiments in sound, where he embraced accidents and the power of chance to shape different sonic dimensions.
Additionally, I talked about Anne Imhof, a contemporary artist working in performance art, who represented Germany at the 2017 Venice Biennale, the same year Romania was represented by Geta Brătescu. Anne Imhof won the Golden Lion by transforming the German pavilion into a performative space. She created sketches for her performances, mapping out the placement of each performer in the space and time, exploring the intersection of paths in a given environment.
I also discussed institutional theory and the idea that an art object undergoes a specific trajectory to become recognized as art. I referenced theorists and artists from the field of land art, emphasizing how they developed the notion that an artwork does not need to be confined to a gallery space.
Then we moved on to discussing the exhibition and the idea of artistic practice as a space in itself, where the artist experiments with their discourse and uses various tools. In the exhibition at the MV Sci-Art Center, we explored this intersection of spaces, each of us representing a space through our practice and personal discourse. At the same time, we dealt with the unified space of the venue, which brought these individual spaces together. That’s when Mirela Vlăduți suggested we call the exhibition “Interspace.”
RP: It seems like your work often engages in dialogue with other artists and historical art movements. Can you elaborate on that aspect of your practice?
MT: It’s a situation where I’m developing something for the first time—approaching the concept of the network. I tried to engage in dialogue with each artistic intervention in the space through my own intervention. You can see how I connected with Tudor Mutrescu and his area, or with Sânziana Gheorghe through various hyphens —what I call those diagonal lines made from strips of paper tape, which I refer to as hyphens in order to connect with Paul Neagu’s discourse on the Hyphen series and how he saw a link between the lower part, the upper part, and the immaterial. Neagu referred to the circle as a striking absence, a presence manifested through absence, much like people around us who change over time but remain present through their absence.
Paul Neagu is an artist I have followed for some time, partly because of this emotional reference he evokes for me and to the connection with my thesis. Similarly, Oscar Hansen’s work resonates with me, particularly his development of the nine principles of open form. His concept of open forms involved angular lines that were never strictly vertical or horizontal, as verticality or horizontality brings a static quality to the line. Instead, he moved toward open, mobile, and dynamic forms, which introduced this frequency of diagonal lines into his architectural discourse.
RP: Did you also study architecture?
MT: No, I studied geodesy, topography, and cadastre, completing six years, including a master’s degree, and then I started studying arts in Painting. Now I’m finishing my PhD — next week I will exhibit my doctoral project, supervised by Camil Mihăescu, at the UVT Art-Center, that little house next to the Faculty of Arts.
RP: And do you still have time to go to the studio and participate in so many projects? How do you see your role as an artist evolving within Timișoara’s distinct art scene?
MT: Yes, I actually spoke with George Roșu about this, yesterday. My doctoral topic is the void, because it addresses the notion of presence and absence at the same time, the void as an intersection between two dimensions—transcendence and representation. I was talking to George Roșu also how last year, in 2023, I was invited to collaborate in multiple contexts, and I realized that this is also part of my research topic—dissolving oneself within the art scene through your own contribution. In fact, the research can continue in this form of collaboration, as I have noticed how creativity fuses within my practice, it integrates with this kind of direct collaboration.
I’m not the type of artist who exclusively works in the studio, shutting myself in my laboratory or studio, blocking off friends. On the contrary, I am open to spontaneity and to how, through a simple conversation like the one we’re having now, something can trigger a spark I’ve been seeking for some time.
RP: The materials you use seem carefully chosen, often everyday items like nylon thread, paper tape, and metal. How do you select your materials, and what role does materiality play in your work, and specifically in the project you proposed for the ”Interspace” exhibition?
MT: I work with materials that are easily accessible, bringing familiar materials to the viewer, and there is always a kind of weightlessness through this object, this levitation, which is also connected to the theme of the void.
In the current project there is an angular obliqueness, like the trajectories in space. It’s an area I’m continuing to develop, and I wanted to work with. I like how you’ve noticed this difference in materiality—the transparency of the nylon thread with the opacity of the paper tape strip and the materiality of metal. I have a series in this area of metals. If you remember Alex Radu’s exhibition from last year[1], he invited me to collaborate with some other artists, and there I also worked with nylon and tried to stitch a corner of the space with nylon. I realized that the corner has a marginal position in our everyday discourse—when we enter a space, we interact with the floor and the ceiling and the vertical plans of the walls but the corner is marginal, and I felt that the corner might have something to say about us, not only from an architectural point of view. It also has a socio-political dimension, as children are sometimes punished by being placed in the corner. In the opposite corner to the stitched one, there were metal plates that I had engraved with oblique lines. It was the first time I worked with metal. I used the metal plates from some metal shelves that I reconfigured and created panels that I suspended on the wall, creating these continuous, repetitive line inscriptions. These lines could evoke thoughts of prisoners counting their days and time on the walls, inscribing lines, marking each second or minute that passed.
RP: How does this relate to your previous points about dialogue between artists and the work and influence of Paul Neagu?
MT: The network I created is also connected to a performative intervention in Maria Orosan’s ”Draft” program, where she invites art students to think of interventions at the intersection of curatorial discourse and artistic discourse. At one point last year, there was a retrospective of Paul Neagu’s work[2], featuring archival pieces and Maria Orosan suggested, considering that Neagu had a significant pedagogical influence on an entire generation—Anish Kapoor, Antony Gormley, Tony Cragg are extremely well-known artists today on the international scene, and they were Neagu’s students—Orosan, thinking about this aspect, suggested having a dialogue with students from the Faculty of Arts and activated the Draft program in the context of Neagu’s exhibition. My proposal for ”Draft #26” was ”When Absence Becomes Presence. Untitled Drawings” a site-specific installation and a performance that explored marginal, seemingly unnoticed areas that are part of the constant trajectory of everyday life, such as the corners, as I mentioned before, and also this idea of intersection of spaces that I continue to investigate in ”Interspace”.
Mihai Toth (born 1990), a PhD graduate from the Faculty of Arts and Design in Timișoara, with a thesis titled The Void – Between Transcendence and Representation, uses drawing, object, and installation in his practice, approaching them as performative gestures, with performance being his defining mode of expression. Between 2009 and 2015, he studied at the Faculty of Civil Engineering at the Politehnica University of Timișoara, where he completed his bachelor’s and master’s theses in land surveying and cadastre, after which he began his studies at the Faculty of Arts and Design in Timișoara. During his studies, he became interested in engaging in dialogue with various artistic practices, including those of John Cage, Agnes Martin, Robert Ryman, Bruce Nauman, Hanne Darboven, Richard Tuttle, and others. In his bachelor’s thesis, Hyphen – Graphic Conversion, he developed a dialogue with Paul Neagu’s Hyphen series, outlining a conceptual process of translating a visual language element, the line, taken from the three-dimensionality of sculpture and transposed into a two-dimensional graphic form.
Raluca Paraschiv (Ionescu), artist, researcher, and lecturer at the National University of Arts in Bucharest. With a transversal professional background in the fields of visual practice and theory, cultural management, and communication sciences, she is interested in researching and promoting contemporary art and its associated educational practices in projects concerned with the multiple facets of the archive, nature and habitation in relation with technology and media. Author of a doctoral thesis entitled Dialogue, Memory and Discourse in the Relationship between Public Space and Art. The case of Bucharest after 1989 and holder of an MA in Creative and Media Enterprises at Warwick University. Member of AICA International Art Critics Association, Chevening Graduates Association, NECS European Network for Cinema and Media Studies, Romanian Artists Union (UAP), and president of REC (Resources for Education and Culture) Association.
This journalistic material was created with funding from the Energie! Creation Grants, awarded by the Municipality of Timișoara through the Project Center. The material does not necessarily represent the position of the Project Center of the Municipality of Timișoara, and the Center is not responsible for its content or how it may be used.
[1] ”Individual compus | Individual All-Around”, curated by Alex Radu, organized by /SAC at Timișoara Garrison Command, September 22nd – December 3rd, 2023
[2] ”Paul Neagu. A Retrospective”, curators: Friedemann Malsch, Magda Radu, Georg Schöllhammer co-curator MNArT: Andreea Foanene, Timișoara National Art Museum in partnership with Kunstmuseum Liechtenstein, BRUSEUM / Neue Galerie Graz, The Paul Neagu Estate (UK), Salonul de proiecte Association (co-organiser), 15.12.22 – 15.04.23