Tomáš Vaněk (CZ)
26th – 30th May 2010, Pécs (Hungary)
within the project „Apartment Adventure – Tour“ co-organizer: PLACCC / Art that takes you by surprise International Festival of Site-specific Performance 26th – 30th May 2010, Pécs (Hungary)
VISUAL ARTIST TOMÁŠ VANĚK INTRODUCES HIS ACOUSTIC SCULPTURES IN PÉCS
Tomáš Vaněk (*1966) graduated from the Academy of Fine Arts in Prague. In the mid 1990s he was a member of the Headless Rider, a free group with people who quickly became the leaders of young generation. In 1999, Tomáš Vaněk started to deal with events and interventions for a specific place and situation. Since the beginning until now, he has been unifying them with Particip although they are very different kinds of accesses in architectural, perceptive, functional, communication and social relations that drew his attention in the specific place. We can also observe Vaněk’s movement from visual transformations and adding a specific place for a performance towards the work with language and sound installations.
There are over 90 Particips and the number of author’s individual exhibitions and participations in shows is even higher. Vaněk was given the Jindřich Chalupecký Award in 2001. The general public perceived Vaněk through his sprayed motives from Josef Lada’s drawings where he underlines eroticism of Lada’s female figures; they were censured because of the protest of the heirs of Lada’s copyright. Vaněk had the very first exhibition in České Budějovice in the same year. He covered the walls of the biggest gallery room with prints of hundreds of “dirty” balls of various sizes at collective exhibition 20 Percent Sale. Since 2007, Vaněk has been the member of the transzitdisplay gallery council. Since 2000, he has been a member of the PAS (Produkce aktivit současnosti/Production of Contemporary Activities) association. It has realized a vast central piece for the new building of the National Technical Library in Dejvice, Prague that was build according to a unique design of Projektil architecture studio.
(Source Jiří Ptáček)
TOMÁŠ VANĚK’S PARTICIPS
Tomáš Vaněk calls his projects according to their functional potential they articulate – “particips” and “distributes”. The series of particips was launched in 1999 where the first sprayed pattern drawing was realized in public space. Vaněk left the limited space for presentation of art and he entered the environment where sprayers, stickers and various urban visual and graphic culture were his competition. Projects from the category of distributes with the important project of neo-samizdat formulate parallel possibilities for spreading information out of standardized and commercialized structures. Vaněk works with social authenticity that moves art to the level of an immediate communication experiment in real conditions of the present. It defines new formats of a piece of art, its functions and presentation.
(Source VVP – AVU)
heatrical thriller and apartment-adventure-tour – PLACCC takes Pécs
Art that takes you by surprise – In May PLACCC Festival is here to transform the Cultural Capital of Europe and shed new light on the city of Pécs
Cutting-edge artistic experiences await all who will attend in PLACCC Festival between 26 and 30 May. Become a voyeur and witness a theatrical thriller in the backyard of a family home, take part in an apartment-adventure-tour that will introduce you to intimate productions in Pécs’s Uran City and discover land art installations, living „monuments“ created in downtown Pécs. After two successful editions in Budapest, PLACCC takes Pécs to show how site-specific performance and public art can transform urban spaces. With the collaboration of Hungarian and international artists, re-discover the city as a beautiful setting for new adventures.
On 28 and 29 May PLACCC Pécs will present the internationally acknowledged Dutch Compagnie Dakar for the first time in Hungary. Their performance Disposition of Life is a unique experience where spectators become voyeurs in the garden of a family home and witness a theatrical thriller that stages the unthinkable. What happens when strangers invade your home? What if the intruder refuses to leave and stays?
Seated in the real-life setting of a house in the midst of a residential area, the audience will be voyeur and accomplice to the strange happenings.
A refreshing theatrical treat, Compagnie Dakar will send a chill down our spine, while showing how drama can unfold off stage.
Pécs artists form the core of PLACCC Festival and amongst others, the Déli Szél (Southern Wind) artists‘ collective will surprise us with site-specific installations in the centre of Pécs. Appearing in the most unusual locations, their work aims to re-interpret the urban landscape and shed new light on the relationship of local and outsider. Shelter, a series of land art creations made especially for the festival will bring intimacy to public space. The installations can be visited throughout PLACCC Pécs and some will potentially become permanent monuments of the city.
Uran City Explorer is a joint venture of local and international artists and aims to show us a different side of Pécs’s ambivalent district Uran City.
Two by two, spectators will be embark on the apartment-adventure-tour, zigzaging between different generations of housing developments, to arrive from one apartment to the next. In each flat a new artistic experience awaits them, ranging from performances to installations and interactive situations. Conceived in collaboration with theatre makers, visual artists and architects, Uran City Explorer is based on the everyday life and context of Uran City, but at the same time offers a new take on a stereotypical view of this district.
Alongside Hungarian Pécs- and Budapest-based collaborators, the project includes the work of Tomáš Vaněk, an acknowledged Czech visual artist who will create a site-specific sound installation especially for PLACCC Pécs, as part of an international cooperation Places of Act – Use Your Public Space piloted by Four Days Association (Prague, CZ).
PLACCC Festival was launched in 2008 with the aim of introducing the genre of site-specific performance to the Hungarian public and to inspire local artists to create site-specifically. Artists draw inspiration from well-known sites and objects of our everyday urban existence in order to transform them and re-define them in a refreshing way. They use the city as a stage and invite us to re-discover it with them. In the first edition of PLACCC, in 2008 spectators ‚learned to fly‘ in the courtyard of the former Socialist Party Academy, were taken on an exciting bicycle journey into their inner thoughts and memories and joined the search for love in a shopping mall. 2009 brought other forms of artistic thrills: an opera in slang in the underground labyrinth of a cave, concrete mixer trucks were transformed into giant urban disco balls, derelict basement doors were re-decorated in vibrant colors and algae was used to clean smog-infused city air, while the passers-by themselves could participate in building ‚community couches‘ from recycled material in one of the popular squares of Budapest.
In 2010 PLACCC is back to show that the city is more than a setting or a stage, it is an inexhaustable source of inspiration and play.
If you are convinced that you know Pécs and the places that you pass by daily, PLACCC Festival is here to prove you wrong and invite you to look at the city with a fresh eye.
Come, re-discover and enjoy.
More information at: www.placcc.hu
PLACCC Pécs is organized by Artopolis Association and is part of the Pécs 2010 – Cultural Capital of Europe programme.
Partners: Pécs 2010 – Cultural Capital of Europe, Hungarofest Nonprofit Ltd, Royal Netherlands Embassy, Summa Artium – Krisztina Polgár Foundation, Visegrad Fund, Four Days Association, Prague City Council, Ministry of Culture – Czech Republic, Moholy-Nagy University of Art and Design Budapest
Discover the atmosphere of last year’s Budapest edition on film: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GbFvBKqk4oU
