Artists: Charles Atlas, Bora Akinciturk, Simon Brossard & Julie Villard, core.pan, Rafał Czajka, Marek Delong & Anna Slama, dzurillah, FUTURA 2000, Yannick Val Gesto, GRAŃ, Jakub Hošek & Nik Timková, Thomas Jeppe, Paul Maheke, New Magic Media, Reaper Death Seal Corporation, SAMO©, Anna Solal, Vít Soukup, Sarah Tritz, Jan Vorisek, Esmay Wagemans
Visual identity: Rafał Czajka
Live events
28 June, Afterparty DJ’s @ Klub Bar Fiesta
21 July, Reaper Death Seal Corporation takeover, VR game
03 September, Jan Vorisek, performance
“Nights are for dancing”
The exhibition deals with the phenomenon of club music as a driver of change in civilization. For over 50 years, since its inception, the music club has been an outreaching experimental space, with every generation constantly redefining the relationship between culture, the body and community.
From avant-garde, stage-based jazz and rock theatres, discothèque temples with crowds of dancers sabbathing below the DJ’s stage, through abandoned warehouses, factories and meadows transformed by nomads in autonomous zones with their own rules, laws and much dreamed-of but temporary autonomy, to mobile apps melting the materiality and geography of our lives and allowing us to step at any moment into the middle of any eclectic dance floor from anywhere in the world, the club has been a constant generator of new transformative energy dissolving into its surroundings. First socially, as a place generating new relationships, finding and developing identities and communities with ensuing emancipation requirements; and economically, in the form of profit, its regulation, the grey and black economy; also urbanistically in the form of gentrification, but ultimately also physically, as a concentration of human bodies, releasing noise, heat and fluids to the immediate surroundings.
This exhibition focuses specifically on the material aspect of club culture, from architecture with its specific requirements; the infrastructure supplying the necessary music equipment and providing for the feeding and excretion of visitors; through cultural artefacts, tribal fetishes, clothing, interventions in the proponents’ own bodies and environment; to the visual form of graphic communication, interior design and the physical human bodies – moving, sweating and touching one another.
The exhibition title refers to the existing Ostrava club of the same name, considered to be one epicentre of local alternative, non-materialistically oriented and excluded culture. At the same time, our use of the title refers to queer culture as the primary, if not the main, creative impulse of the “club” as a safe zone for free expression of one’s own identity and sexuality. Last but not least, we also see it as a manifestation of our desire for Fiesta to continue being such a place of freedom of expression.
The exhibition is not a museum show of authentic artefacts, but of contemporary art works. It involves artists who are active on the contemporary club scene, trying to redefine it or working with the overlaps of music and visual arts, as well as those whose work somehow refers to the subject or could serve as its apt illustration. The purpose is to open the “club” with all its associations and to generate a meaningful atmosphere allowing it to be grasped not just as a musical, political or generational, but primarily a social phenomenon.
Michal Novotný
21 June / MagazinSzum.pl: „klub Fiesta” at Plato Ostrava
21 June / Tzvetnik.online: Klub Fiesta, a Group Show at PLATO Ostrava
30 June / Artviewer.org: Klub Fiesta at PLATO Ostrava
31 June / O FLUXO: Klub Fiesta, a Group Show at PLATO Ostrava