Curated by Blanca de la Torre @ TINA Biennale, Prague
FORMS OF ENGAGEMENT
Sep. 25th - Oct. 15th, 2008
Chief curator: Micaela Giovannotti
Guest curators: Rosanna Musumeci, Yukiko Ito, Blanca de la Torre, Viktor Misiano, Marek Tomin, the Greyzone Collective.
The third edition of TINA B. – The Prague Contemporary Art Festival, strives to combine the creative energy of the cultural scene in Central and Eastern Europe with emerging talents and trends from around the world. The festival is organised by Prague’s Galerie Vernon and held under the auspices and with the support of the Ministry of Culture of the Czech Republic and the City of Prague. Tina B. 2007 has already featured more than 70 artists from over 15 countries.
Adopting the leitmotif FORMS OF ENGAGEMENT, TINA B. 2008 focuses on the relationships between art and society, exploring the role of contemporary art, artists and artistic practice as socio-cultural agents that not only provide a critique of social order, but also serve a direct, positive and symbiotic social function on both a local and global level.
TINA B. presents artworks that employ the new and innovative artistic media generated by digital and mobile technologies, as well as focusing on art in public space. The festival will feature light art, artworks with an essential active light component (projection, installation or neon), as well as focusing on the phenomenon if street art with a surprising and original approach. While the light art section will literally “throw new light” on various exterior and interior locations in Prague, the street art section will interconnect the energy of the urban environment with the contemporary art scene and provide space for artists working on the margins of art genres.
The third edition’s focus on the ways in which art engages with individuals and society is all the more pertinent in the year of the 40th anniversary of the momentous events of 1968, which had a major impact on society and politics throughout the globe, as well as on Czechoslovakia in particular. TINA B. 2008 feels honoured to be able to make at least a small contribution to the commemoration of an anniversary that is a strong symbol of liberty and free thinking (as well, unfortunately, of the ill-fated imposition of political and military might).
ALTERNATIVE REVOLUTIONS, curated by Blanca De La Torre with the support of VideoArtWorld
With her section Alternative Revolutions focusing on video art, curator Blanca de la Torre encompasses a series of works that could be seen as a subversion of the classical concept or behavior of Revolution.
Taking Marshall Berman‘s ideas about understanding modern society in an open way (All That Is Solid Melts Into Air: The Experience of Modernity, 1982), de la Torre applies its core ideas to the concept of revolution, understanding it in a more expansive way. Therefore, we can see all sorts of political, intellectual, social and quotidian revolutions as part of one dialectical process, and to develop creative interplay among them, enlarging our vision of our own experience and giving our daily lives a new resonance and depth.
Participating artists include Katarina Zdjelar (Serbia/Netherlands), Eugenio Ampudia (Spain), Montse Arbelo and Joseba Franco (Spain), Avelino Sala (Spain), Cristina Lucas (Spain), PSJM (Spain), Brody Condon (US), Ana Prvacki (Serbia/Singapore), David Maroto (Spain), Jenny Marketou (Greece) and Johanna Billing (Sweden).
VIDEOCRACY, curated by Micaela Giovannotti with the support of Woolo Productions
Wooloo Productions and its brainchild, Wooloo.org, questions issues of national identity and contemporary social structure, utilizing various forms of political engagement and professional collaborative undertakings. Through the web based artistic platform of Wooloo.org, Wooloo Productions launched an open call for international artists to submit videos on the theme of Rebranding Acts and to participate in the exhibition taking place in Prague, thus opening the dialogue to a wider audience and acting as a democratic messenger in the global art world. To even further echo the curatorial collaboration, Wooloo Productions presents a strategic political campaign with the title Defending Denmark. The intentional lower case spelling does not refer to the specific nation but rather signifies the general notion of increasingly non-specific cultural and political identity in contemporary life.
Rebranding Acts is an investigation into cultural identity in an age of global migration. The project asks artists to look closely at the ongoing production of “nationality” in their home countries and to examine the ways in which this public narrative includes certain individuals and groups – while excluding others.
The REBRANDING ACTS project then encourage artists to perform and document acts that aims to “rebrand” the national identity in question, exploring questions of cultural identity in a time where national belonging is becoming an increasingly discussed topic in political debates throughout the world. Facing the challenges of an increasingly globalized economy, combined with internal demographic questions such as the issue of aging populations, and a growing number of immigrants and refugees, a large number of nation states are currently undergoing vast transformations. Often, these transformations include a strong rise in new forms of xenophobia, fueled by the media and capitalized upon by populist political parties.
