FRIDAY Oct 11, 21:45 @ Art Café
As part of the JAMA 78 program, there will be a discussion accompanied by the presentation of the 73rd issue of Flash Art Czech and Slovak Edition on the theme of Festivals.
Art festivals, symposia, and seminars serve as intersections where various genres meet; alongside music and film, many of them have a strong visual art component. In this new issue of Flash Art, we reflect on the significance, dramaturgy, motivations, curatorial practices, and transformations of the visual programs at festivals. We focus on festivals such as Pohoda, 66 hours, Kvantum, Kiosk, Artwife, and Hradby Samoty, as well as Czech festivals like Luhovaný Vincent, PAF, Transforma, Proud, and others.
What place does visual art hold at festivals? During a discussion with Ilona Németh, Fero Király, and Eva Vozárová (združenie.ooo), we will consider what festivals bring to small towns and villages, how they activate them, and to what extent contemporary art festivals are urban and therefore elitist. We will discuss how the perception of visual art at the Pohoda festival, which Ilona Németh has been curating for a long time, has changed.
Does it make sense to organize mass festivals in the era of environmental crisis? If so, how can this be done? How are festivals financed? Could they survive without public funding? Another topic associated with festivals is the precarious and sporadic work involved in them, which we will also address.
Flash Art Czech & Slovak Edition is supported by public funds from the Arts Support Fund, the main partner of the magazine, the Ministry of Culture of the Czech Republic, and the State Cultural Fund of the Czech Republic.
Ilona Németh is a visual artist, curator, activist, and professor. She has been actively exhibiting since 1990 both domestically and internationally. She co-founded the Department of Intermedia at the Academy of Fine Arts and Design in Bratislava. Since 2021, she has been a professor at the STU in Bratislava at the Faculty of Architecture and Design, where she is establishing a new interdisciplinary study program “Art in Public Space” with colleagues. From 2018 to 2021, she served as the artistic director of the international exhibition and research project Eastern Sugar. In recent years, she has presented her works at Documenta fifteen in Kassel (2022), as well as in Ljubljana, Riga, Yogyakarta in Indonesia, Paris, and Olomouc. She lives and works in Bratislava and Dunajská Streda.
Lýdia Pribišová has been the editor-in-chief of Flash Art since 2015. She is the curator of the Slovak representation at the 60th Venice Biennale with the project Floating Arboretum by Oto Hudec. She works as a curator at the J. Koniarik Gallery in Trnava. From 2020 to 2024, she was a curator at Kunsthalle Bratislava. She is interested in the boundaries of art, participatory projects, and ecological themes; from 2022 to 2023, she curated the A Plant program at Kunsthalle Bratislava, which included a public space program in Bratislava addressing the issue of greenery in the city.
Združenie ooo was established in the spring of 2020 from the need to create a dedicated space for exploring the world through sound art, contemporary music, and intermedial art. The authorship and curatorial focus of the association and its founders, Eva Vozárová and Fero Király, centers on projects that delve into complex relationships between human and non-human beings, encompassing areas such as acoustic ecology, deep listening, environmental and social themes, as well as disciplines like anthropology, philosophy, mathematics, and other fields of knowledge.
LANGUAGE: SLOVAK
