TINA B. – THE PRAGUE CONTEMPORARY ART FESTIVAL
The TINA B. Festival is a unique art event that is organized every year in Prague by Vernon Fine Art International. In 2009, for a period of three weeks in October, Prague will become the mecca of contemporary art, where, like every year, artists and art from central and eastern Europe and from around the world come together. TINA B. is an acronym for ‘This Is Not Another Biennial’. However, the name also evokes the idea of a sensual figure – the festival’s female patron, a mysterious woman with a continuously changing appearance, who entices thousands of visitors to the Prague festival. Once again this year, the festival is being held under the auspices and with the support of the Czech Ministry of Culture and the City of Prague.
TINA B. 2009
8. - 25.10.2009
VIP WEEK: 8. - 12.10.
Locations: the historical centre of Prague
- the cellars of the Stone Bell House, Wenceslas Square, pedestrian zone Ovocný trh, Vernon City gallery, the neighbourhood of the Charles bridge etc.
Now in its fourth year, the TINA B. Festival will take place in Prague between 8 and 25 October 2009. This year’s main theme is ‘New Era’. Like last year, the festival will present art that works with new media and employs innovative artistic techniques.
Each year the festival shows art from all over the world. In 2008 the main focus was art from Japan, Korea, the United States, and Italy. In 2009 the festival will focus mostly on art from Israel, Switzerland, and the Middle East. Prague will host around 50 artists and 7 curatorial projects.
This year’s curatorial projects are by Blanca De La Torre Garcia, BBB Johannes Deimling, Paulina Kolczynska, Nina Colosi (with the project Streaming Museum), and Greyzone (projects curated by TINA B.), Doron Rabina A part of the main festival programme is VIP Week – a week of special events and visual performances during which prominent collectors, journalists, artists, curators meet up.
Once again unusual exhibition spaces have been chosen. One section of the festival, for example, will lead visitors into a space that is otherwise almost unknown to the public – the cellars of the Stone Bell House. The VIDEOsection will again be located in large containers right on Wenceslas Square in the centre of Prague. As always the festival has a good chance of attracting wider public interest in contemporary art in a way that established galleries are not usually able to do.
THE FESTIVAL’S MAIN THEME – NEW ERA
In 2008 the TINA B. Festival focused on Forms of Engagement, among other things, reflecting freely on fateful turning points in Czech history – the years of 1948 and 1968. The key them of this year’s TINA B. Festival is defined by the phrase ‘New Era’. The organizers are thus shifting attention towards the new outlooks made possible in the Czech Republic by the Velvet Revolution in 1989.
This curatorial concept is underscored by the TINA B. Festival’s resolve to explore the relationship and links between new, experimental forms of artistic expression and wider cultural and social aspects and contexts. With the onset of the New Era, freedom returned to the Czech Republic, both in everyday life (freedom of movement, the opportunity to travel and to study abroad) and in the overall way of thinking in society.
The fourth year of the TINA B. Festival approaches art as an impetus that leads individuals and society towards self-reflection and towards thinking about the direction of the modern world. For us, art reinforces democratic society and its ability to cope with extreme political and social phenomena and is an indicator of a healthy society and culture.
In 2009 the TINA B. Festival will emphasize some serious social issues but will also be showcasing works of artistic value and with appeal to the public. By focusing on art in the public space and new artistic media, such as the digital, mobile, and internet technologies used regularly in everyday life, the TINA B. Festival ranks among the most important events of contemporary art on an international scale.
ARTISTIC SECTIONS AT THE 2009 TINA B. FESTIVAL IN PRAGUE
· Performance Art
· Light Art
· Sound and Radio Art
· Digital and Video Art
PERFORMANCE ART
The highlight of the TINA B. Festival in 2007 and 2008 was the week of special events and visual performances. Performance art is one of the boldest forms of contemporary art and performances were held at a wide variety of locations in Prague – on the Petøín Lookout Tower, on the Vltava River, at Ovocný trh, the downtown street market, as part of a street party, on Wenceslas Square, and at Laterna Magika Theatre. Visitors interested in contemporary art were thus taken out of the gallery space and oftentimes drawn directly into the creative process.
In 2008, this section drew participation from some renowned Italian artists – Stefano Cagol, the group Coniglio Viola, Enrico Centonze, and Casa. In 2009 the TINA B. Festival will pick up on this very successful project with a show of diverse visual performances created by top artists from around the world.
LIGHT ART
Almost every work of art involves light. However, for some artists, light is their main creative medium. New technologies have moreover made it possible to work with light in very precise ways. Light projections, installations, and works using neon bulbs are a key part of the contemporary art scene. Many works of art involving signs and graphic symbols made out of neon bulbs were present at this year’s Venice Biennale and at recent art fairs in London (Frieze, Pulse, Zoo).
The large section devoted to light art at the TINA B. Festival is literally intended to ‘throw new light’ on well-known and less well-known exteriors and interiors in the City of Prague.
The LIGHT ART section promises visitors rich and powerful aesthetic experiences and will certainly become a magnet for the wider public. However, even in this case, there will be no shortage of intellectual or human significance to the works.
SOUND AND RADIO ART
Among the most remarkable and most impressive events held in the first two years of the TINA B. Festival were the projects presenting sound art such as the sound installations inside the National Monument on Vítkov Hill in 2006 and in the Old Sewage Treatment Plant in Prague 6 (Ecotechnical Museum) in 2007. In 2008 there were also a number of extraordinary works of sound art, the majority of which were created directly for the TINA B. Festival and broadcast by Czech Radio. In 2009 the TINA B. Festival will again devote itself to this somewhat overlooked but nonetheless distinctive genre of art.
WHAT VISITORS CAN LOOK FORWARD TO
Blanca De La Torre Garcia / The Threshold of the Noosphere
The Italian curator Blanca de la Torre Garcia is coming to the TINA B. Festival with the project ‘The Threshold of the Noosphere’. It concentrates on the current state of our society, which is characterized by the emergence of something entirely new when it is in crisis. The term ‘noosphere’ (from the Greek noos, nous, = ‘mind’ and sphaira = ‘sphere’) emerged as an analogy to the terms ‘geosphere’ (the inanimate, material world) and ‘biosphere’ (the animate world). It is a kind of collective consciousness that is currently spreading across the earth. New media technologies support the rapid creation and transformation of collective intelligence. A new visual language is coming into being. Society has reached a critical point – we are witnessing the breakdown of the current world system and the environmental and ecological deterioration of our planet (e.g. global warming). But this crisis is paradoxically leading to a return to the principles of spirituality. All these developments and changes in society are signs of the New Era and are of course also embodied in art. As Eric Davis says, ‘we call on the beast to show itself’. Let’s apprehend a new reality.
BBB Johannes Deimling / Performing Arts Workshop
This year’s TINA B. Festival in Prague will welcome the performer and lecturer BBB Johannes Deimling, who will hold a special performing arts workshop, which he is presenting at a number of cities inside and outside Europe. Through practical and theoretical exercises and discussions the workshop participants will try to explore the most important questions about and approaches to the performing arts. Johannes Deimling’s workshops focus on the perception of the self, communication through the body and by means of one’s own body, and issues of time and space. The main objective of the course is for participants to understand the human body as an instrument and to learn to use it in communication. The results of the workshop will then be presented in the context of internationally recognized events and festivals focusing on this art form.
Nina Colosi / Streaming Museum
This year the TINA B. Festival established cooperation with the Streaming Music organization (Electrotechnical Museum), which was formed 29 January 2009 in New York. It draws inspiration from the artist Nam Jun Paika’s visions in the 1970s of an ‘electronic superhighway’, which virtually unites the entire world and operates as an open and free medium of the imagination and inter-cultural dialogue. Streaming Museum is now creating a worldwide network of cultural metropolises to which it broadcasts works of art and exhibitions in real time through the Internet. It is a highly progressive project whose results will be presented in Prague for the first time as part of the TINA B. Festival 2009. (www.streamingmuseum.org)
TINA B. MEETS MINI ROOF ART
At the pedestrian zone - Ovocný trh in the centre of Prague TINA B. prepared this year a special art projekt TINA B. MEETS MINI ROOF ART, which picks up on a previous successful exhibition held in 2008 called MINI ROOF ART.
Seven artists - Santiago Montoya, Jacob Ouillette, Mauro Cuppone, Tomas Spevak, Dita Havránková, Markéta Hlinovská a Dan Hanzlík were creating their artistic interpretation of MINI roofs and this time also a unique design for a MINI car.
The unique design of the MINI trademark has been proved itself in a half century of popularity in the market. It meets the requirements as a base for a work of art while also being a popular automobile, that is, an object of everyday use. In this aspect the MINI ROOF ART project thematically blends the theme of NEW ERA.
As our understanding of “New Era” also implies social tolerance and responsibility, we intend to use art to help others in need.
Like last year, this year’s event is also devoted to charity. When the exhibition closes, all seven MINI roofs will be auctioned off, and a portion of the proceeds from the auctioning of these art works will go to the European Art Centre for Disabled Children Sněženka.(www.snezenka.org).
Doron Rabina / BEYOND GUILT
In the BEYOND GUILT exhibition the Israeli curator Doron Rabina presents mainly videoart works. It focuses thematically and conceptually on guilt as its motif. Guilt is perceived here not just as the source of reflection on moral responsibility but also a source of ideas and as a generator of life.
The project links the term “political art” to values like imagination and originality. Political responsibility is characterized as an intimate space and as a path, not as a kind of repentance.
Doron Rabina views guilt as an emotion that questions the definitions in our own conscience and awareness.
BEYOND GUILT plays with emotional weight of loss, sin, and injustice. However, it also offers positive elements – visual impressiveness, humour, and delight in innovation.
The exhibition BEYOND GUILT presents for example the artists Oliver Hussain, Guy Ben-Ner, Roee Rosen, Ronnie Bass, Ruti Sela & Maayan Amir, Uri Nir and Gilad Ratman.
Paulina Kolczynska/ PERFORMANCE ART OF THE 80´s COMPARISON
This exhibition brings together a very specific group of works by three artists who, in their native countries, carried out series of art performances in the years between 1976 and 1983. Introduction to Comparative Study of the Performance Practices of Jiri Kovanda, Hassan Sharif and Zbigniew Libera from the 1970’s and 1980’s.
Independently from each other, Jiri Kovanda (in Prague, between 1976-1978), Hassan Sharif (in Dubai, between 1982-1983) and Zbigniew Libera (in Warsaw, between 1981- 82) experimented, explored and ultimately widened the scope of performance art through their neo-avant-garde strategies. This period brought a number of significant innovations to performance art practices and this exhibition seeks to identify and examine them.
TINA B. ON THE ROAD
One of the main objectives of the TINA B. Festival is to assemble artists from different countries and create an intercultural artistic dialogue. This idea is behind the section titled ‘TINA B. ON THE ROAD’, which brings together artists from different countries and with different artistic focuses. Travelling abroad to explore art in other countries and art markets, the organisers and curators of the TINA B. Festival encounter many different artistic figures. They try to bring those whose work stands out as particularly remarkable to show their work to the Prague art world as part of the festival.
In ‘TINA B. ON THE ROAD’, TINA B. 2009 again highlights many diverse approaches to art that reference the NEW ERA theme. Given that this year TINA B. is looking specifically at the Swiss art community, this section will also host many Swiss performers. You can look forward for example to the artists Andrea Bianconi, SEMP, Katja Loher, Selina Trepp, Franz Gratwohl, Victorine Muller,
Marion Ritzmann or Stirnemann Inkarttext.
CONTACTS:
PR, press – marketa.faustova@tina-b.com
Advertising, marketing – lucie.slavickova@tina-b.com
Artist coordinator – lucie888@centrum.cz
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