Psychedelic Comedy

The Divine Comedy of our days. Hell, purgatory, paradise? Poetry, video, music and performance by Nela Bártová and Jana Orlová. Both are united by their desire to combine genres and their conviction that Dante actually wrote a psychedelic book…

The performance was part of the Poetry Day festival, 15 November 2021, Kaštan (Unijazz), photo by Eliška Šárko

Ancient Gods Are Still Online

Video/ performance for a camera

I recited my poem „Ancient Gods Are Still Online“ in the video while working with the slime. It is a contribution on connecting performance art and poetry.

Messages of Tugendhat Vila II

The second part of the site-specific project in Tugendhat Vila was performative; it was a physical interaction with the space. In the case of Villa Tugendhat, I responded to the space with a glamorous dress that was in direct contrast to the performative physicality. At the same time, I installed my body shell as another museum exhibit (the villa is under a strict no-touch regime; only performing artists were allowed.) The project was part of the International Performance Art Festival Possibilities of Interpretation (Interpretation 1: Open Situation), curated by Tomáš Ruller. Photo: Mizuki Nakeshu and Bohdan Holomíček.

Messages of Tugendhat Vila I

The site-specific work with space in this project had two parts. The first one was poetic-conceptual – installation: I placed words or verses in various places in Villa Tugendhat, either on square KAPA boards or on pieces of simple white crockery if it was a living space, or also on clothes (in this case it was a dressing room). These words interacted with the space, its past and present. The words or phrases were created during the connection to the villa through poetic and anthropological empathy in the real-time of the performance, without a pre-prepared text, in direct confrontation with the genius loci that also decided their placement. At the same time, the words were positioned in such a way that they could be read as a poem, even as the viewer walked through the villa in different orders or different directions.

The project was part of the International Performance Art Festival Possibilities of Interpretation (Interpretation 1: Open Situation), curated by Tomáš Ruller. International festival of performance art Possibilities Of Interpretation, villa Tugendhat, 28.6. 2021, Photo: Mizuki Nakeshu and Robert Carrithers.

Live Writing Broadcast

I decided to make the process of creating artwork „live“ for those interested. Due to restrictions associated with the coronavirus epidemic, the performance took place in the glass box office of the Komedia Theatre, where I had set up a provisory studio. Equipped with tea and a face mask, I wrote poems in it for three hours, and immediately after writing them I glued them on the glass of the box office for the audience to read. Because the box office is located in the passageway of the arcade, a certain percentage of the audience were also random pedestrians. The texts written during this experiment were published in the poetry collection You Won’t Run Away, published in 2022 by the Brno publishing house Větrné mlýny. Next Wave Festival: Days of Franz Kafka, 11.5. 2021, photo Anna Černá.