The performative actions evening in the former Bauhaus in Ostrava introduces three live interventions mirroring the static part of the exhibition Preparatory Portrait of a Young-Girl.
The figure of the Young-Girl as one of the major archetypal symbols and at the same time marketing mechanisms of contemporary culture is revived here in artistic performances concentrating on the cold charismatic character of fashion shows and the affectedness of acting scenes. At the same time, all three actions – by Lukáš Hofmann / Saliva, the Brud Group and Aleksandra Ska – point out the role of instant image documentation spreading expansively on interconnected screens. The mechanisms forming the body of the Young-Girl like a manipulated digital image only appear in photography and video, showing the desired results of staged performances. Simultaneously, these retrospectively constitute, in an endless circle, the politics of real bodies, nourished through the screens with electric waves of desire and delight.
The enormous space of the deserted hypermarket becomes a part of a corporate apocalyptic vision, in which the marketing mechanisms attacking consumers who don’t possess anything more than their own time, are reverberated by their endless replaying.
Michal Novotný, curator
Programme
6pm Aleksandra Ska: OAA/Vege version, 2012/2017 + Natalia LL: Consumer Art, 1972
6.45 – 8.30pm Lukáš Hofmann / Saliva: Dry Me a River, 2017
Performers: Coco Kate, Vojtěch Fröhlich, Lukáš Hofmann / Saliva, Magdalena Mitterhoffer, Alexandra Myshalova, Jiří Pitrmulc, Marat Zakirov and others TBA
interval
9pm Aditya Mandayam for Brud: Milf-selfie, 2016
9.30pm Afterparty / Producer and DJ Strachkvas
Mobile bar and refreshments COKAFE
Aleksandra Ska (*1975, Łódź, Poland) is an intermedia artist and activist. She studied at the Akademia Sztuk Pięknych in Łódź. She lives in Poznań. In 2011 she was awarded the Medal Młodej Sztuki. She is the head of the Sculpture and Spatial Art Forms Studio in Szczecin. Her artistic practice undermines socially and culturally rooted models of sexual identification, emotional expression, interpersonal relations and life roles. She conceives her installations, videos and objects as visual and haptic metaphors with the purpose to transform social and cultural patterns of thinking and acting.
Natalia LL (*1937, Żywiec, Poland) has been a pioneer of performative feminist art in Central and Eastern Europe. In 1970 she co-founded the PERMAFO Gallery in Wrocław. In 1977 she was on a residency in New York thanks to a scholarship of the Kościuszko Foundation. She was among the first female artists worldwide to criticize, from a feminist perspective, conceptual art for its excessive rationalization and lack of physical sensuality.
Lukáš Hofmann / Saliva (*1993, Prague) is an artist with flexible and subtle identity at touch, an occasional DJ, model and promoter saving the internet medium. He studied at the Academy of Fine Arts in Prague. He lives in Berlin. His artistic practice is based on performative expression underlining the collective dimension of physicality. He works with the aura of personal encounter, its commodification and documentation. His area is that of the third reading and balance in simultaneous contrast. His collaborative projects were presented at the Schinkel Pavilion in Berlin, at the Moderna Museet in Stockholm, and at the Cabaret Voltaire in Zurich.
Aditya Mandayam (*1984, Bangalore, India) is a photographer, filmmaker and theorist presently living between Warsaw and Vienna. He studied linguistic anthropology in Jakarta and at Stanford, and biological cybernetics in Tubingen. He graduated from the Rijksakademie van beeldende kunsten in Amsterdam; he took part in residencies at Wiels, Brussels and at Rupert, Vilnius. Brud (dirt in Polish) is an Indian-Polish collective operating from a former slaughterhouse in central Warsaw. The Brud practice moves freely between the stage, the screen and the eye.
In partnership with Dolní oblast Vítkovice and Ottolinger.