Fluid rituals

8 pm — Tea Project / Iva Polanecká

Sound performance and tea sipping

The Tea Ceremony is an ongoing dialogue that traverses a variety of landscapes. When you taste the leaves of the slow-growing ancient trees, which are mostly wild but cultivated tea trees that are almost 100 years old, you can activate many blocked sensors. As a result, there may be a moment of silence that can make us think of the power of non-image memory.

Achieving a spiritual state of selflessness and peacefulness through the preparation and sharing of one bowl of tea, I emphasize that I am sharing something that is both dear to me and so familiar from everyday life.

Iva Polanecká (*1990) is an audiovisual artist interested in the invisible areas of the world. Her relationship with nature, which she tries to communicate to the viewer, is mirrored in the inner and intimate feelings of a person. She abstracts the given reality, but still leaves room for the imagination of the human mind. Her works are often site-specific sound installations, audio works, field recordings or performances.

 

9 pm — No Man Steps into the Same River Twice / Auxig

(aprox. 35 min)

An audiovisual performance by the international collective Auxig responds to the Baroque garden in a contemporary context with relation to the change in the environmental perceptions. The artistic group turns the focus of the viewer towards the topic of water, reflecting and questioning the relationship to water as a tamed element. Through their site-specific intervention, the artists highlight the unsustainability of this position, perceiving this isolating attitude as problematic.

Therefore, the artists embody the perspective of the river and abandon their usual way of perception – the audiovisual materials used for the performance are taken in direct contact with the river (hydrophone, underwater camera). The collective brings the river back into the garden environment with the help of field recordings and site-specific projections, thus drawing attention to the interconnection, even dependence, of the entire site on the water of the Wild Vltava.

Auxig is an international collective of sound and visual artists based in Ústí nad Labem – Petr Hanžl (CZ), Polina Khatsenka (BY), Jan Krombholz (CZ) and Barry Yuk Bun Wan (HK). The basis of their work is open collaboration, time-based media and working with conceptual and physical space, which each artist treats with their own distinctive approach and technique. Their most common form of presentation is audiovisual site-specific performances, which often result in spatial installations.
The topics most often addressed in their work are the context of place, acoustic ecology, field recordings, interactivity and the blurring of the boundaries of authorship.

Organized by GHMP within the Bio Troja project in cooperation with Artbiom