Gaël Charbau, František Kowolowski and Petra Vlachynská talk with Alain Berland about art in public space, with the support of the Czech Cultural Centre.
Gaël Charbau is an independent artistic director.
Committed to the French art scene, he has been working for the past fifteen years to improve its knowledge and recognition on the international scene by organising exhibitions in France, Asia and Europe. He is the artistic director of the Emerige Revelations Scholarship, a programme he founded with Laurent Dumas in 2014, and has been curator of the Hermès Foundation's programme of artists' residencies in manufacturing since 2013. Since 2015, he has been artistic advisor to Universcience (Cité des sciences et de l'industrie and Palais de la découverte). In 2018, he was appointed artistic director of Nuit Blanche. In 2020, with the Manifesto agency, he was appointed artistic director of the future athletes' village, Paris 2024. In 2023, he was appointed artistic director of the event Un été au Havre for 4 years.
A Czech multidisciplinary artist, František Kowolowski is a performer, curator, teacher, co-founder of the group František Lozinski o.p.s. (2005) and the International Festival of Performance Art - A.K.T. in Brno. He was a long-time curator of contemporary art exhibitions at the Brno Art House in the Czech Republic. He was dean of the Faculty of Arts at the University of Ostrava, where he teaches and runs a painting workshop.
In his work, František Kowolowski uses his experience of the art industry. He deals with the ephemeral, artistic recycling, the association of a thing with a certain place and the manipulation of its meaning in a given context. His themes include emptiness, nomadism, centres and peripheries, etc. He is also interested in the question of cyclical time in performance and ritual as a form of creating ephemeral works.
He has participated in a number of international art festivals, such as INFR'ACTION 08, International Performance Art Festival, Sète, France; Préavis de désordre urbain, International Performance Art Festival, 2nd edition, Marseille, France; grenzART, Oberland Performance Art Festival, Kirschau, Germany, Live Action, Goeteborg, Sweden, Beijing Live Action, China, etc.
Petra Vlachynská is a Czech sculptor whose work deals with abstract and figurative themes. At the same time she creates in public space and architecture. She studied architecture at the Technical Faculty of the Czech Republic and at the Val de Seine School in Paris, and sculpture at the Academy of Arts and Crafts in Prague. In her doctoral thesis she studied artworks in Prague after 1989 and their relation to the urban context of the city. She is interested in art in public space in many projects, such as projects she works on in collaboration with the Jaroslav Fragner Gallery, the architectural magazine ERA21 and the Institute for Planning and Development in Prague. Since 2022, she has been Vice-Dean for Science and Research at the Faculty of Arts and Architecture in Liberec (Czech Republic). There she co-directs a workshop on new media and site-specific art and teaches courses on creation in public space in relation to architecture and society.
Amphithéâtre des Loges - 14 rue Bonaparte, Paris 6e
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