Mario Mu is a visual artist and filmmaker, working predominantly with computer-generated video to explore morphologies of space and politics.
Born in 1987 in Yugoslavia and raised in Herzegovina and Croatia, Mario Mu now lives and works in Germany. Since graduating from the Universität der Künste Berlin in 2017, his work has been presented internationally at institutions and galleries including Lombardi-Kargl, WHW Collective, 60th Venice Biennale, Seager Gallery, Northern Sustainable Futures, Manus Gallery, Singapore Art Museum, CICA Museum, TAP–Théâtre Auditorium de Poitiers, V2_ Institute for the Unstable Media, MGLC Ljubljana, MAAT Lisbon, Museum of Contemporary Art Zagreb, and Milan Machinima Festival.
Throughout his work, Mario Mu investigates the politics of spatial morphologies, examining how architectural, cinematic, and virtual spaces are produced, negotiated, and how human decisions ripple outward to shape collective life. Each of his projects approaches space as an active force, continuously formed, arranged, and charged with memory and ideology. Staging experimental film, virtual environments, and archival fragments, he explores how the politics of space influence perception and structure social relations. The space around us is always an act, and the world we inhabit is always an invention, an arrangement of seeing.
The Sun,The Mast or Gravity
HD Video / 07:00 min / 2022
00:45 min excerpt
A Yugoslav architect, Vjenceslav Richter, once imagined a floating pavilion like a sailing ship with a mast, suspended by steel cables. For this project, he planned to recover parts of a bridge destroyed during the Second World War and build the pavilion using the ruins. The Sun, the Mast or Gravity takes these rusted elements to form a branching structure that connects unrealized visions with fallen landmarks—from the mast of the unbuilt pavilion to the shattered facade of the National Museum of Aleppo in Syria, another of his projects.
The modernist ideal of progress, once reaching toward the sun in clear, rational forms meant to embody a universal spirit, was soon humbled by gravity, fracturing into an economy of growth, extraction, and war that cast long shadows across the twentieth century.
This film moves through the afterlife of that dream, translating the language of modernism into digital morphologies, not as monuments to failure, but as material for reassembly.
Before and Above Us
HD Video / 04:32 min / 2024
01:18 min excerpt
Before and Above Us is a cinematic reconstruction of the fractured landscapes of conflict, reinterpreted within virtual space. Drawing on historical sound recordings from public and military archives, the film sequences are recreated within computer-generated environments, blending real events with digital architecture into pictorial compositions. The sound of aircraft cuts through the wind, constantly shifting under an untraceable pressure of anxiety; the clatter of helicopters, distorted interpretations of folk music, soldiers’ voices, and the breaking of the sound barrier all emerge, with butterflies acting as unsettling moderators of the imagery.