TINA B. at the Venice Biennale 2010

The festival of contemporary art TINA B. held every year in Prague invites you to visit 2 exhibitions in Venice at the 12th International Architecture Exhibition. First of them is the common exhibition of the artists Katja Loher & Hans Focketyn (CH), ANNA MONICHI (IT) and GIULIANA CUNÉAZ (IT) in Arsenale in the frame of the project PASSION 4 CLEAN IDEAS.

The TINA B. Festival is a big art event that is organized every year in Prague from 2006. For a period of three weeks in October, Prague becomes the mecca of contemporary art, where the artists and art from central and eastern Europe and from around the world come together. It is the international platform, where new trends, new artists and new ideas are brought to the birth.

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.

The festival presents art of the new media and  innovative artistic techniques. It is specialized in certain art classes, i.e. video art, sound and radio art, performance and installation, also in the public space. We see the art as something what is still moving and still fresh.

This year this faboulous imaginary TINA B. will be in Prague from 7th - 24th October but she uniqly decided to visit the Architectonical Venice Biennale and to present there together with the TINA B advisor Serena BACCAGLINI the following artists.

Within the start of the Venice Biennale on 26.8. 2010 TINA B. opens here the exhibition of 3 artists: Giuliana Cunéaz (IT), Anna Monichi (IT) and Katja Loher (CH) & Hans Focketyn (CH) in Arsenale in the space of the PASSION 4 CLEAN IDEAS project created by ExpoVenezia, which brings together the artists and architects who are closely involved in new ways of thinking about art and the enviroment.

In August contemporary and through till November 2010  TINA B. will also present  an exhibition in the Porsche showroom Padua, Italy.

In November, right after the end of TINA B. festival in Prague, Tina B. will come to Venice again with the selection of works from exhibitions in Prague. The TINA B. exhibition will be presented in the gallery space of the famous Canale Grande at the Claudio Buzziol Gallery (http://www.fondazioneclaudiobuziol.org the TINA /) and in the church of St. Leonardo. TINA B will give you more detailed  informations about this artistic adventure further on.

ATJA  LOHER & HANS FOCKETYN (CH) / Collapsoscope

KATJA LOHER

Working with different mediums and with a number of collaborators from around the world, New York-based, Swiss artist Katja Loher’s  explorations of language and visual form come together in an assemblage of present technologies and dramatic sculptures. Tranlating, in poetic metaphor, the “ambivalent relationships between power, freedom and dependency,” she creates a powerful visual platform that pulls the viewer out of his current perspective and provides a broader perspective with which to address existential questions and present concerns in the world.

Katja’s work has appeared internationally in numerous solo and group exhibitions including MAXXI Museum in Rome, United Nations Pavilion at the Shanghai Expo, Art Digital Moscow, the State Hermitage Museum, KKL Luzern, Galapagos Art Space NY,  Biennale Chongqing, Found Museum Beijing.  In the last years she received several awards including TPC CreaTVty Award from the Swiss TV Production Center, artist residencies in New York, Berlin and Beijing.

Hans Focketyn has developed his work as an architect interdisciplinary. In numerous projects he collaborated with artists and musicians in live spectacles or sculptural bodies. Since 2002 he is working at Herzog & de Meuron in Basel, where he works as a concept designer. In his work he is exploring the generation of form based on complex and specific programmatic and spatial relations. The design process generates architectures and forms based on natural and geometric structures. He presented his works in different conferences and exhibitions in Basel, London, and Italy.

COLLAPSOSCOPE

70cm Diameter suspended object, Video projections on the surrounding walls

The Video-Sculpture Collapsoscope manifests the collaboration of international artist Katja Loher (1979, born in Switzerland, lives and works in NY) and architect Hans Focketyn (1976 born in Belgium, lives and work in Basel).

Collapsoscope simulates micro society that manifests the battle of increasing the productivity but enlarging the market. The issue of the performed situation is not about how to make but how to “throw away” the products. What remains is a vacuum – a threatening state for all the members.

Collapsoscope  plays with the contrast of a recognizable sculptural form and the ever-changing dynamics of its reality in the video.This new video-sculpture consists of both: an internal and an external perspective of a microcosm. In the interior of the sculpture, the camera zooms into the crowd and lands on the individual whose feelings and attitudes becomes apparent. In the choreographed videos, which are growing out of the sculpture and projected onto the surrounding walls, the camera zooms out. The blisters on the surface of the spherical sculpture appear to fill up with video images until they are spit out and land on the walls.

2 Openings in the front lead the eyes into the inside of the sculpture where a kaleidoscope consist of round shaped mirrors reflects macro images in an endless space. On the walls the multilayered video presents choreography in the bird’s eye view. Crowds of people dressed in minimalist uniforms that perform synchronized movements. In this choreography the individuals transform into seemingly abstract patterns until finally an ornament emerges like in a kaleidoscope. From this bird’s eye view the crowd has its own distinct rhythm without looking just like a sum of its parts. A relationship between performers becomes apparent. What remains is an forceful beauty of hundreds of bodies...

ANNA MONICHI (IT) / BARBIE CHAIR

ANNA MONICHI

Anna Monichi, an Italian creative born in Padua, is studying the design at the University in Venice. She has worked in several well known design studios and galleries in Milan and New York City. She was involved in the international design exhibitions like “Salone Satellite”, “Fuorisalone” during “Saloneintenazionale del mobile di Milano” and “ICFF” in NYC. She started her career as a designer, but also as a PR and project manager for various events at the field of design. These days she is working as a co-ordinator of the Festival of contemporary art TINA B. 2010 in Prague.

BARBIE CHAIR

Barbie Chair is a reinterpretation of a cult object, disassembled and reassembled to create another object of common use, the chair. It would be fun to transform the Barbie, just a toy, used in the childhood, in an object which could be usesdalso in an adult age. Here it is an innovative and funny idea - to transform a cult toy, like the Barbie, in a design object. The design is a game and playfullness is one of the function of Barbie Chair. The object is composed from a main structure in steel, the soul of the different pieces of the Barbie, assembled and riproposed for a chair. The doll invites to recreate every part of the chair with a succession of parts of its body… following the order in which the body sits on a chair... legs make up the legs of the Chair, the basins compose the sitting, the bust make up the seat back that ended with the heads of Barbie .

The back, alived in the repetition of busts of many Barbie, can even have a "therapeutic effect" on the person sits on it! The project won the design contest at the Salone del Mobile di Milano 2004.

GIULIANA CUNÉAZ (IT) /

NEITHER SNOW NOR METEOR SHOWER

Giuliana Cunéaz was born in Aosta and lives and works in Milan. She graduated from the Academy of Fine Arts in Turin and uses all artistic media, from video-installations to sculpture, from photography to painting, and even painted screens.
In the early Nineties, she embarked on an avenue of research that involved exploring forms combined with video experimentation. Her first works convey a personal re-elaboration of minimalist languages and those related to Arte Povera. In the decade at the end of the 20^th century Giuliana Cunéaz was focused on musical composition, on the research on the imaginary body, the complexity and identity. In 2005 3D became part of her research, so much so that it became an area of research both in terms of video and painted screens. Giuliana Cunéaz presented her exhibitions in Italy, Spain, France, Brazil, Hungary, Germany or The Czech Republic. From her recent exhibitions we could mention the solo show Inner Flux at the Vernon Gallery in Prague in 2009, solo exhibition in Parma Temporary Palace in 2010 or the participation to the third Seville Biennial and the twenty-fifth edition of International Videoformes in Clermont-Ferrand. This year was also published a monograph edited by Vernon City Gallery in Prague, which collects the work on screen painting from 2006 to today.

NEITHER SNOW NOR METEOR SHOWERS

Neither snow nor meteor showers is an installation created in 2010 which expands into space by means of different types of sign: 3D animation, painting, digital print on canvas, and sculpture. It is a simultaneous overflow of languages, an exchange between several different voices that share a common frequency.

Giuliana Cunéaz formalized her work on nanotechnology in her screen paintings, a completely innovative technique she has invented, whereby virtual images coexist with painterly elements. In this way, she challenges conventions by painting directly onto the screen surface, thereby establishing a link between the individual, non-reproducible sign of painting and the standardized sign of technology.

The artist works with the transformation of things, and is concerned with an entropic process that allows her to develop a fresh perspective on landscape - a situation in which the artificial aspects of the work overlap, yet never exactly coincide with, natural ones, in a progressively expanding physical and mental space.

Giuliana Cunéaz draws the observer into a fluid, unstable universe dominated by the dis-memberment of forms, postulating a new de-constructivist hypothesis: taking responsibility for a development model that embraces and absorbs the complexity of everyday technology.

3D animation emphasizes the enigmatic, ambiguous qualities of forms, as none of them can really be assigned a specific identity, but turns out to be part of a complex architecture that evokes a mythical structure - like the Tower of Babel.

In the case of Neither snow nor meteor showers, the animated sign inside the  screen painting migrates to invade the surrounding space, and settles as layers of acrylic paint, only to lose its material substance, turning into digital ink. At the same time, the physical substance of painting occupies parts of the plasma screen, causing unpredictable developments. Again following the same process, some virtual elements from inside the animation are scattered outside and made tangible in their plastic quality. The intervention's fluid continuity creates an immersive effect. Migration, disaggregation and re-composition appear like intrinsic qualities of the work. It is these forms that contain memory and follow one another, generating a spontaneous flow that contains anything from nanostructures to macrocosm - a story that moves towards an 'other' secret reality, embedded in the heart of matter itself.

The contemplation of an object is replaced by the verification of a hypothesis through meaning reversal. What we witness, then, is a hybrid world - both biomorphic and nano-technologic, where art and architecture strive to be one and the same.