Peter Suchin, ArtReview, 2007
"In the video recorded in a single 15-minute take and titled Work/Arbeit/Rabota, seven people of various ages, races and dispositions wander around the blacked-out room, followed by the camera and its operator, both occasionally visible within the mirrors, an autocue positioned above the lens feeding the stalked participant their lines, When the camera closes in on someonem he or show speaks directly to it: "I had this dream. I was superman and my father was a clairvoyant," utters a young blonde woman. Others talk of revolution, of the economic system, or ask, "What is the work? We bought some work, we made some work." Individuals and utterances are by these methods and devices, divorced and dislocated; we know the actors lines have been chosen for them. This crude ventriloquism takes a further twist when one discovers that the script was assembled from interviews the members of Szuper Gallery (Susanne Clausen and Pawlo Kerestey) carried out with each other, and that the people in the video stand in, in some not entirely clarified manner for the artists at an earlier stage of their by now extensive, somewhat variegated artistic practice."
John Gayer, ART PAPERS, p.56, 06/2006, Atlanta
"Mixing parody with social commentary Szuper Gallery present an abstract view of people who work on the margins of the acting profession. The unsequential time structure of this anti-film underscores the ambiguity of their position by both reflecting and distorting the manner in which most films are made. As in the work of Dada artists, the nonsensical character of the production has a moral underpinning. The Extras , also discloses the antipathy to which this class of workers has been subjected."
Lorna Brown, Set Project, Vancouver, 2005
"Szuper Gallery's work has ranged from the occupation of Bloomberg's London headquarters after hours, to CRASH! at the ICA, in which the artists set up a day-trading office within the gallery, to Performance with Police Uniforms, an intervention into a nightclub in which the participants were costumed in the police uniforms designed for the 1972 Olympics. In the ICA presentation, funds were traded (and lost) as an examination of the intersection of the art and finance: in the latter, the participants engaged in the conventional nightclub activities in their borrowed obsolete uniforms. Throughout their work, Szuper Gallery challenges the division between lived and represented reality, history and fiction, and the defined limits of performance--or art practice in general."
Liftarchiv, particularly with the film Nirwana , implants a massive shake-up of the ideology otherwise cultivated there: of a 'just', 'regulated' weeding out or admitting into a society based on a federal republic. Nirwana , a video performance by the Szuper Gallery, uses the immigration office at night as its setting. The 'pedagogy' of the site is made visible by alienating it: because it is unusual to crawl in absurd poses through the empty halls of the immigration office at night, it suddenly becomes obvious that the 'normal' movements of the visitors represent a highly artificial form of movement. 'Normal' behaviour in the immigration office includes polite, patient waiting and inconspicuous movement that does not carry with it connotations of sexual desire. The 'normal' sequence of events entails that the conversations between employees and the visitor-subjects will take place behind doors and hence are not seen and are certainly not transparent. The 'normal' behaviour entails a series of fixed, hierarchical arrangements, a person on each side of a counter, someone familiar with bureaucratic language and the other less so - the 'normal' behaviour consists of a kind of performance of objectivity and value neutrality as well as non-emotionality. The employees acted accordingly: they rejected the film and protested it.
Pirjetta Brander, 2006, Hiap Bulletin 01, pa. 24-26, Helsinki
"The Szuper-group has dauntlessly begun to chart large and hard-to-define subjects and concepts that time and again defy interpretation. Surprisingly the starting point of their work is not the personal, individual experience or point of view. Their acts could rather be described as being as hard to define as their subjects, and their performances could be named action verbs: with the help of seemingly invisible activities and acts, they change our point of view towards things that we think of as given."
Andrea Tarsia, 2001, Whitechapel Art Gallery, London
"If Szuper Gallery provide more than a temporary ‘making strange’ of institutions, this is largely achieved through the creation of their own meta structure – the Szuper Gallery – through which their work is mediated and discussed. Continuing the act of appropriation that signalled its origins, Szuper Gallery exists, temporarily, at the moment in which the artists occupy their chosen target. With every video or installation, the space they occupy is transformed into the Szuper Gallery, precisely through their manipulation of its codes and functions. This is the déjà vu, or mirage, that they so skilfully create; the overlapping and simultaneous presence of the space they are showing in with the ideological space that the Szuper Gallery creates.
These are not the impassioned gestures of institutional critique as we knew it. Although they share a sensibility with earlier works, such as Chris Burden’s TV hijack, Szuper Gallery’s videos appear detached and disaffected, sharing the slacker attitudes of Generation X rather than, for example, Hans Haacke’s violent destruction of the floor of the German Pavillion at the Venice Biennale. Yet such gestures seem no longer possible today, when institutions both celebrate and neutralise the subversive. One option left open, Szuper Gallery suggest, is to shift the focus from a monolithic understanding, and reaction to, dominant power bases, to a performative reading of institutional power, addressing the discurisve processes through which its meanings are formed, communicated and grafted onto the individual. This allows Szuper Gallery to move from outside agitators to inside infiltrators, acting like hackers that infect institutional codes with disruptive viruses."