Łukasz Guzek
FNAF 9 – TRANS, a report
Praha – Holešovice, culture boat Altenburg 1964, boulevards on the Vltava river, September 1-3, 2023
Lenka Klodová, curator and inventor of FNAF, organizes the festival every year under a leading slogan. But that’s not what’s original about her concept, because many festivals have more or less metaphorical titles, but the fact that she takes the topic seriously. The festival is usually accompanied by discussion panels and conferences. Thus, she gives this artistic project a scholarly character. The FNAF Festival, in Klodová’s assumption, is a research and artistic project, so it has been included in a relatively new, contemporary area of research, which, however, has already developed its own methodology and is a well-established way of creating in art, both in terms of the content of the works and their visual forms. FNAF 9 in 2023 also has a FNAF EDU component related to the issue of nudity in the art teaching process. Nudity, as a nude study, has been the basis of academic teaching since the beginning of the history of the Academy. In turn, actionism is a relatively new field in artistic education, seeking its place at art academies. The combination of these two factors, tradition and modernity, creates the ground on which a contemporary Academy can be built.
Klodová, via FNAF, placed performance in a new artistic field. At the same time, she gave performance art itself a new character, adapting this type of artistic practice to the lines of development of contemporary art. So far, in the history of art, performance art has been present as one, homogeneous trend, distinguished from other artistic practices, or art media. Performance art, when it was created in the 1970s, was new compared to traditional media such as painting or sculpture. Today, it has lost its novelty status and has become one of the equal media of art. And this is how it works in the Academies. Therefore, in the unified field of performance art, distinguishing subcategories is a task that specifies performance practices by indicating a specific workshop and contextual practice, socially located in art discourses. In this way, subtrends are created within performance, with their own theoretical background. Just like in the history of science, distinguishing new fields leads to specifications that prove the development of science, its vitality and openness to new things (unlike religion based on dogmas).
Distinguishing works of art based on the naked body in the field of performance is such a classifying and pro-development measure, ensuring a place for performance in the art created today. In this way, FNAF provides performance art with vitality and the possibility of creating new forms in art. There are probably other performance subcategories that can be distinguished today. However, the category of nudity is basic and essential, i.e. it encompasses the essential character of works of performance art, thanks to the fact that they are based on the somatic and mental condition of a person. It is also historically grounded in works of body art. Therefore, it has artistic continuity, which ensures that the works being created today are grounded in the field of art. The FNAF festival is therefore of great importance for the construction of contemporary art. It is a continuation of its development lines, and at the same time a new position ensuring the place of performance within its contemporary trends.
So FNAF is not one of the festivals with a traditional formula, where artists present various forms of this art – the more individual the solutions, the better. During this type of festivals, the most important thing was not to repeat a form already invented by someone, in order to be original. This means that the presented art was governed by the main principle of the avant-garde – originality. Referring to the text by Rosalind Krauss – the basis, i.e. the equivalent of the grid, was the individual psychophysical condition. This approach, practiced for decades, allowed performance to crystallize as a separate art discipline. Performance artists could circulate in a network of festivals taking place around the world. However, this was the situation in the 1990s and the first decade of the 2000s. Then the movement of performance festivals as a distinguished field of art fades out and festivals are organized less frequently, which is due to the generational change in the performance art scene, but also to changes in the art itself. Today, we see it clearly, the generation of pioneers is leaving the stage and is not being replaced by young people who no longer see themselves as performers, but just as artists. It is the result of the success of performance art, which has gained an equal position with other artistic disciplines with a much longer history. But at the same time it ceased to be the avant-garde of art. This also forced it to be placed in post-avant-garde and post-modern art discourses.
FNAF is a young festival and Klodová is an artist belonging to the generation for which performance is one of the possibilities. As an artist, she uses all techniques, creates videos, paintings, installations and photographs (see my text from her cross-sectional solo exhibition in Ostrava at https://www.midart.eu/body-fiesta-or-we-all-are-animals/). Art for her is postmodern ‘anything goes’, not avant-garde militancy in favor of any new form of art. She is therefore perfectly prepared to give a new role to performance art and she does it by dealing with nudity in performance, or as she calls it – body design.
Within FNAF, there are various attitudes towards nudity. Sometimes it happens that artists ignore the festival’s theme, although Klodová emphasizes its monothematic nature. The curator is tolerant here and does not apply dogmatic rules – this is one of the post-avant-garde and post-modernist features that contrasts with the modernist avant-gardes which very sharply set the boundaries of their concepts and fought against any deviations. But at the same time, this attitude of the curator means that the responsibility for tackling the topic falls on the artists themselves. Everyone needs to consider the topic of nudity. Take it – or not. And most importantly – how to do it. Klodová experiments with the possibilities of artists, inviting to FNAF also those who have never done nude performance before or dealt with the body. Here they can open up to new possibilities – or not. This is a certain problem for older artists who are used to the unifying definition of performance, which ensured that any form could be included in the festival.
As a teacher at Brno University of Technology, Faculty of Fine Arts, Klodová runs the Body Design studio, which deals with the subject of the body in various aspects, located in various contexts, both historical and in contemporary mass culture. The naked body is an accessible and handy artistic material. Its direct live presence in art eliminates the distance between the work and reality, unlike in the case of pictures made in traditional media which always create such a distance. At the same time, nudity has a critical power, it makes art radical and groundbreaking. This is an unusual program for art education. Klodová’s studio is probably the only place in the world where the artists are trained, paying no attention to compromises with the market or institutions.
FNAF in 2023 was the ninth edition. This is a long enough period of time to consolidate its position on the performance art scene, as well as to consolidate its topic as an important part of the performance art discourse. Below I present briefly examples of works of performance art by artists who took up the topic of nude action and created new formal and artistic solutions.
Below is the curator’s statement:
“FNAF is a monothematic and multi-genre festival. As you can see from the title, festival focuses on how human nakedness is perceived. The festival consists of two days of art performances, lectures, workshops and spatial events.
The topic of 9th issue of FNAF is Nudity as trans:
The meaning that we would like to bring to the fore is support for all beings who have gone through any transition. The moment of transition is a moment of pure nudity in the sense of the requirement of absolute honesty with himself/herself. At the same time, trance means a state where the state of our consciousness changes, no matter what we support it with. It has to do with subjective transformations of time, space and perception. And this is already close to the definition of performance art.”
Performance Art trans-forms
Let’s list some possible ways of understanding the key term trans in many senses, as a transition, change, transformation, gender change, personality change, identity change, psychic trance, change of state of consciousness, translation, technology transfer and between various old and new technologies.
NUDE FORMS IN THE PRESENTED PERFORMANCES (categorised)
Creation of a living sculpture (during or as the finale of a performance). Trance here consisted in persistence, for a longer or shorter period of time, or in slight movement.
Lenka Klodová, as always, opened the festival with her performance. FNAF is political, so its performance also referred to current politics. She appeared naked, with yellow flowers on her breasts, blue on her crotch and red on her ass. In this way, she welcomed especially artists from Ukraine on the Vltava boulevard, next to culture boat Altenburg 1964.
Olha Skliarska performed next to the boulevard. Initially, she appears static to the audience – she stands with permanent sculptural elements made of plaster, placed on her head, hands and feet in such a way as to prevent movement. Apart from these she is naked. When these elements are removed, it covers the body, including the face, with green paint, as if with camouflage, and “disappears” in the grass. Then she takes another action to prevent movement – she wraps a bandage around her hips and breasts. Finally, she puts the sculptural elements back on, creating a unified form out of herself.
Vlodko Kaufman performed next to the boulevard. The final sequence was breaking the glass windows suspended in the space of the ruined structures of the demolished building with a throw of a stone. He then lay naked on the glass in a fetal position and stayed that way.
Philemon Mukarno incorporated his naked body into iron rods – the remains of the building’s structure, in the same place.
Anastasia Prozora, performing naked on the bank of Vltava, used water from the river to mix with sand and build towers, presenting as if a memory of her childhood and fun on vacation, then she lay down on the sand and stayed like that.
Alexandra Holownia, on the boulevard, starts dressed in props, doing a fashion show from a sexshop (performance of too many gadgets). She ended up doing a striptease.
Fausto Grossi, performed in the hold of the ship Altenburg 1964. In his individual performance, he first shaved his body hair and then covered it with gold, metallic pigment, presenting himself as a visual form – a living sculpture.
Darina Alster promenaded along the Vltava boulevard. Her naked body was covered with a tight-fitting pinkish mesh that did not cover her nakedness, but turned the surface of her body into sculptural matter, like a living statue. Her face was covered with an ornament of “precious stones.”During the performance, she read a text of a poetic nature, the ambiguity of which belongs to the style and privilege of the goddesses’ expression.
Dariusz Fodczuk invited his student, Natalia Skorupa, to participate in his performance, and she outshone his performance because her performance was so individual and visually strong. The artist, at first as a model, stood naked on a platform on wheels and was moved by Fodczuk along the path on the boulevard. However, at some point she started hitting her nose with her fist, causing it to bleed heavily. In the final, she entered Vltava and lay motionless on her back – she looked like a victim of a brutal crime. This nose trick was already used by her, but here it gained power. The blood is real, but the artist knows how to tune her body to make it flow spectacularly. Nudity and blood create a very suggestive combination because they suspend us between extremes such as life and death, eros and thanatos.
Martin Zet also created a suggestive image in his performance. He swam at night, in the dark Vltava, in a silver, shiny suit illuminated from the shore by onlookers with flashlights, looking like a ghost against the water.
A type of performance using a form of interpersonal transfers
Kaca Olivova performed with her husband on the boulevard, they were both naked and created a performance about their mutual relationship. First, she paints him and turns him into a woman – this is a phase of mutual tenderness, and then they throw paper plates with whipped cream at each other like in a slapstick comedy – this is a phase of conflict.
Fausto Grossi and Jolanda Jansen (on the boulevard) in a collaborative performance depicted relationships by swapping clothes – a trans vest fashion show – which looked comical. But in the next part it turns into a wrestling match that ends with a long-lasting hug gesture.
Jolanda Jansen’s solo performance was also about building relationships. She appears naked, and as props she had two naked men tied with a rope. But at the end she frees them and runs naked somewhere ahead along Vltava Boulevard.
Vladimir Havlik, in the hold of Altenburg 1964, adopted in his performance the form of a parascientific experiment, involving the body understood as an organism and not as an appearance. A group of half-naked people stood together and measured the impact of each other using a heart rate measuring devices. The mutual influence caused the participants’ heart rates to even out.
The form of performance that forced us to shift our attention to world problems was explicitly political in nature
Barbara Le Beguec, in her performance in the ship’s hold, referred to the rape victims of Russian soldiers on Ukrainian women. It was a kind of tribute to these women, and it did not allow us to forget that at the time of the FNAF festival, a brutal war was taking place in Ukraine and Ukraine was repelling the Russian attack. Everyone now understands that this is also an attack on Europe and this would also be the fate of women in other countries. The artist knows this problem because she participated as a volunteer helping women in Ukraine. At the beginning, the artist told us a story about elephants that undergo an evolution that reduces their tusks, which allows them to avoid being killed to obtain them. It reminded her of images of the Ukrainian women she helped – almost all of them lost their teeth as a result of violence. Her action was a simple gesture – she stood naked in front of the audience, ground her baby teeth in a mortar, collected as a souvenir of her childhood, and immersed her mouth in it. Trance here had the meaning of identification.
Pascale Ciapp, started her performance in the hold of the ship Altenburg 1964. She based the structure of her performance on the story of an albino gorilla from Italo Calvino’s book Mr. Palomar. First she read the passage, but backwards. Then she put prints on her face, like a gorilla mask, and continued the performance in it. She undressed and dyed the hair on her head and chest gray. She continued to perform with props such as tires, which is supposed to bring to mind associations with an animal cage, and to enhance this effect, she asks the audience to look at her actions through a sheet of paper with stripes cut out – as if through bars. She gilded her face – mask and runs until exhaustion, repeating “I can’t explain you what…” Trance was achieved here by physical action.
One performance that particularly moved the audience
Emilie Franceschin, performing in the hold of the ship Altenburg 1964, started by throwing her clothes into a bucket and continued her actions naked. She tied a towel around her head, large enough to use its end to wipe the floor in the hold like a mop. It required effort and took a long time. When the task was finished, she tied a towel around her head and stepped outside, as if from a bath. However, this was not the end, but the beginning of the most important part of the action. Suddenly, the lids of the hold opened above the heads of the spectators, but at the same time the exit from the ship’s hold was closed, making everyone feel trapped. The artist reappeared above the heads of the gathered audience and started singing Édith Piaf’s song Non, je ne regrette rien. We were transported for a moment to another reality.
More on FNAF homepage:
THEORY CUM PRACTICE OF PERFORMANCE ART 2023
FNAF 9 2023 – FNAF EDU
FNAF curator: Lenka Klodová
FNAF Gdańsk Export curator: Łukasz Guzek
FNAF 9 general topic:
The meaning that we would like to bring to the fore in the topic Nudity as trans is support for all beings who have gone through any transition. The moment of transition is a moment of pure nudity in the sense of the requirement of absolute honesty with himself/herself. Nudity is a transition since the biblical interpretation. According to the Book of Genesis, the recognition of one’s own nakedness is the moment of transition from the heavenly, unified state with God to the human destiny, which also includes the concept of sin. Nudity as a reference to an extraordinary personal relationship with God is also part of the religious trance, whether we follow the Eastern tradition of the Jurodivis or the Czech tradition of the Hussite Adamites. At the same time, trance means a state where the state of our consciousness changes, no matter what we support it with. It has to do with subjective transformations of time, space and perception. And this is already close to the definition of performance art.
FNAF EDU Gdańsk Export topic: Nudity in art education. TRANS as a general topic within FNAF EDU was associated with nudity in artistic education. Nudity was and still is the basis of student education programs at Academies of Fine Arts. Contemporary living conditions in the information technology society force us to rethink nudity in the basic methods of artistic education.
PROGRAM
from Monday, September 25 to Friday, September 29
student plein-air on Wyspa, workshops of students of the Gdańsk Academy with Lenka Klodová (Brno University of Technology, Faculty of Fine Arts, Body Design Studio)
Documentation of student workshops by Karolína Raimund (Brno University of Technology, Faculty of Fine Arts, Body Design Studio)
Saturday, September 30, Ratusz Kultury, Gdańsk – Oliwa
from 5 p.m. to ca 8 p.m.
Performances by Czech students (Brno University of Technology, Faculty of Fine Arts, Body Design Studio)
Denie Kony
Leona Vaníčková
Valentýna Vránová
Kristina Štrachová
Kamila Kouřilová
Adéla Kočičková
Eva Gatialová
Natália Drevenáková
Karolína Auzká
Adam Michálek
Michal Durda
David Buriánek
Celestýn Stohr
Documentation by Marek Zygmunt
Sunday, October 1, 2023
from 1 p.m. to 3 p.m.
Presentation of performance works by students of the Academy of Fine Arts in Gdańsk, prepared during plein-air workshops on the Wyspa
Maciej Opara
Kajetan Krawczyk
Aleksandra Augustyniak (Ola August)
Magdalena Rozbicka
Coffee break
from 4 p.m. to 5 p.m.
Performances by artists from Gdańsk (invited by Łukasz Guzek)
Anna Chabowska
Emilia Rodziewicz
Coffee break
from 6 p.m. to 8 p.m.
Performances by artists from the Czech Republic (invited by Lenka Klodová)
Jiří Suruvka
Denis Baštuga
Lenka Klodová
Open discussion
Documentation by Marek Zygmunt (Youtube)
Organizers:
Oliwski Ratusz Kultury, Gdańsk
Academy of Fine Arts in Gdańsk
Brno University of Technology
FNAF – Festival of Naked Forms
(since 2015, originated from Prague, conceived by Lenka Klodova)
HISTORY, ASSUMPTIONS and TIMELINE until 2021
About
FNAF documentation – festival home page: www.fnaf.fun.
Lenka Klodová: FNAF CURATORIAL STATEMENT (general)
The Festival of naked forms (FNAF) is a thematic cultural event which presents artists and projects that work with the topic of human nakedness in all its possible meanings.
The motive for grounding of the mono-thematic and multi-genre festival is fascination with the “naked situation“ and the reaction of people to this. A “naked situation” is the moment of meeting a naked human body in a public space. The first moment of such encounter can lead to a collective onset of physiological, emotional, and intellectual proceedings in various intensity of its factors. That is one of the reasons why the recipients cannot manage such an information and interpret it now. The history of misinterpretation of naked situations is old (significant landmarks in the field of visual arts are efforts to distinguish art and pornography, which were intense in the 1950s and 1960s, or some manifestations of feminist art), but these “quick” reactions can still be seen today. On the other hand, the specific effectiveness of naked situations is often the reason of their use and misuse, either in art or in commerce under the well-known slogan of “sex sells”. We are convinced that for the correct understanding of “naked situations” one cannot rely on “naturalness” (as this is – especially in this case – merely an entry gate through which manipulation creeps in), but it is necessary to gain a specific and more special literacy, knowledge, and awareness. “Naked situations” need to be investigated and actively experienced.
The art genre of performance works with the human body directly. We can often see the impulsive notion that the performance equals nakedness of the artist. That is why we chose this genre as the central art form of the festival. The specificity of the performance in which the artist expresses himself through his body is further compared to approaches that can be found in photography or other disciplines of art in which the relationship of the body is realized through other means.
As far as it is possible within the theme, the performative part is supplemented with other formats such as a small conference where we welcome contributions from various fields of humanities, theory of art, art practice and independent thinking. We also welcome meetings of groups that work with nakedness as a part of their life philosophy (nudists) or as a commercial matter (commercial show in the format of FNAF Escort).
The festival aims to be different from other art performance festivals in trying to engage representatives from outside of the art and apostles of various kinds of nakedness. We don’t want to present the festival as a spectacle or a show, the participation of the viewer is very important, either in the workshops, at the conference, in the discussion or at the free public events.
The festival cooperates with the organizations of Nová Perla Divus, Galerie Futura, Karlín Studios, Kasárna Karlín and Galery KUB in Leipzig.
Each year of the festival is introduced with a theme. These themes are not binding for the artists, their task is to point out the rich semantic possibilities of nakedness and – to a certain extent – react to the present-day mental movements in the society.
2015 – Nakedness hedonic and critical
The first year was started with an ambitious challenge: „Dear artists, please classify your naked art action as either ‘Day of Critical Nudity’ or ‘Day of Hedonic Nudity!’” The starting theme wanted to show that nakedness usually doesn’t point to itself, it has energy and strength which can provoke more concrete questions.
2016 Nakedness national and international
The second year of FNAF didn’t find importance in how we feel in our nakedness anymore. We put all the artists under collective national message. We called their nudity the national nudity and watched the manifested and the hidden differences.
2017 Nakedness young and old
In the third year, we followed the idea that performance in its essence is very old. Old are the bodies of the performers who get undressed since the 1970s. Old are their gestures, mimicked by the young bodies of new artists. Who from our field of work can say he stays young when nakedness is as old as the humankind?
2018 Female nakedness
Within the first three years FNAF has developed into a gender atypical milieu in which we could see more men working with their nakedness than women. In the fourth year we tried to save the stereotype and announced the theme of Female nakedness. We also needed to sum up and revise where the naked body of a woman is now, after the waves of protests against sexism and the Me Too movement.
2019 Nakedness and pain
With a slight overstatement we can say that the self-destructive methods are typical for the art performance, just like nakedness. We were interested in the “positive“ pain, the known and wanted, as it is used in BDSM techniques. If a strong artistic personality takes up this topic, this raw physical method can narrate exceptional bodily and personal stories.
Attention must be paid to the pain unrequested. Nakedness can hurt physically (after all clothing is practically a protection from various types of pain – from injury to frostbite), but it can also hurt psychically or emotionally, it can be a tool of humiliation and denouncement. Pain can be a way how to add political meaning to nakedness.
2020 Nakedness and the Future
The sixth year of the FNAF was affected by the pandemic situation. The theme of Nakedness and the Future became more than symbolical. It confronts the former futuristic and technological optimism with the environmental skepsis and looking for new beginnings. The future touches the human body again, directly in its nakedness, hiding behind technologies, and the power of industrial thinking showed as naïve. In the field of performance, there are many projects that pointed out the possibilities of how to technically improve the human body (Stelarc). Are they still valid? Are we afraid of them? Is there a way to a better future using our own corporeality for the rescue intercourse with Mother Earth (Annie Sprinkle)?
2021 Interspecific nakedness
For this year of FNAF we were inspired by the situation that brought Jacques Derrida to write the essay The Animal That Therefore I Am (2006). The philosopher is standing naked in front of his cat and thinking about his feelings, about his shame he feels standing there and the possible or impossible nakedness of his cat. In this year we would like to cross the anthropocentric point of view and invite also non-human creatures to participate, which can be a big challenge in the genre of performance based on the central object of human body. Maybe it will be easier to work with nakedness once we consider dressedness as an unnatural human invention.
Besides the central event of the festival in Prague, the complex of FNAF includes also two other happenings – SudetenFNAF and FNAF Cool.
Sudeten FNAF has two main features.
The geographic feature – Sudeten FNAF takes place outside Prague, in the newly established cultural centre of Nová Perla in Kyjov u Krásné Lípy. FNAF thus “exports” its programme from Prague to the periphery, where there is a beautiful natural and historical surrounding.
The second feature of Sudeten FNAF is in the programme. It is not only a presentation of the art of performance, but the Sudeten FNAF is a creative and evaluative experiment. For five days, we have invited five artists that took part in the previous years of the festival. During their stay they will create site-specific actions or participative action in which local inhabitants are included. The symposium will be a fixed part of the festival, serving to maintain the bonds with the artists and to have a discussion platform for the next development of the festival.
FNAF Cool – winter commemoration of the Festival of Naked Forms – it takes place in a different time, place, and scale than the summer version of FNAF. Its main point is to bring the festival in a limited version into Brno, to show it to the local community and mainly to the students and pedagogues of the Faculty of Fine Arts of BUT which are under the pedagogical work of the organizer of the festival.
Another purpose is to remember the content in the time between the two years. This event will bring three live performances and the video recordings of the performances that took part in the festival in September in Kasárna Karlín.
A total of 89 artists from 19 countries have performed at the six issues of the festival since 2015.
The festival is supported financially by the Ministry of culture of the Czech Republic, the Magistrate of Prague, and the Faculty of Fine Arts of BUT in Brno.