ARTIST STATEMENT
I am passionate about big urban environments, peripheries in various senses of the word, and the “nomadic” way of living. My mobile lifestyle is precarious but voluntary. Aware of my privileges as a white male and EU passport holder, I strive to go beyond the notion of ordinary tourism and to reflect critically on the issues related to international mobility and political geography through my art. Whenever possible, I escape the “fortress Europe” to experience, pay respect to, and support the countries and peoples of the so-called Third World.
I am a performance and conceptual artist. My venues are streets, playgrounds, parks, highways, shopping malls, rivers, housing estates, supermarkets, buses, trains, forests, fiields, flats, bridges, pedestrian crossings, churches, monasteries, metro stations, staircases, boats as well as art galleries. The main tools of my minimalist artworks are my body and the specific sites where the actions are presented. The performances can last for a few minutes or many hours and be almost invisible or quite expressive. Through my art, I explore the role of an individual in the globalized, mobile world and the power structures that shape our daily lives and movements.
My love for performance art is not only practical but also theoretical. I am active within the scene as a curator and facilitator, give lectures and workshops, organize discussions, support networking between cultural workers, and popularize performance art among the general audience.
BIO
Antonín Brinda (*1990), a Czech artist based in Europe, graduated from different study programmes in art and art theory in the Czech Republic, Finland, and Turkey. He completed internships in Estonia, Greece, Iceland, Latvia, Lithuania, or Russia. Brinda works with performance art and site-specific/urban art. His topics are global mobility, urbanism, or transport infrastructure. To balance the serious subjects, he also likes to present performances that are more personal and humorous.
His performances were presented in No Nation Art Lab (Chicago, US), Cattle Depot Artist Village (Hong Kong, HK), Absence Space (Tainan, TW), Asiatopia (Bangkok and Nakhon Pathom, TH), Nomadic Red Corner (Ulaanbaatar, MN), Artbat Fest (Almaty, KZ), Sofiia Underground (Sofiia, BG), LAPSody (Helsinki, FI), A! Performance Festival (Akureyri, IS), Istanbul Performance Art and Performistanbul (Istanbul, TR), 13festivalen (Gothenburg, SE), or Performance Festival Malamut (Ostrava, CZ), Re-Connect Art (Prague, CZ) and Festival of Naked Forms (Prague, CZ).
Apart from being an artist, Brinda is also an organizer/curator of various (performance) art events and festivals such as SPA-Studio Performance Art and Performancebus (Prague, CZ), Performance Crossings (Prague, CZ), Performensk (Minsk, BY), or Wärmflasche (Berlin, DE). He was a guest curator of the New Performance Turku Festival (Turku, FI), Carbonarium Festival (Kyiv, UA), ARé Fest (Yerevan, AM) or Artbat Fest (Almaty, KZ) and one of the curators of MeetFactory’s Artists-in-Residence program (Prague, CZ).
Antonín would like to know, “How to make love with a city”.
CONTACT & CV
a.brinda@seznam.cz
Menhir Hunter, Příbor, CZ, 2014; photo: Vojtěch Brinda