Matter of Art Talks #3: Bára Šimková in conversation with Tereza Stejskalová

Barbora Šimková is a graduate of the Digital Media Studio at the Faculty of Art and Design at Jan Evangelista Purkyně University in Ústí nad Labem and of the Intermedia Studio at the Faculty of Fine Arts at the Brno University of Technology. In her activist projects, she reflects on social and political themes of the contemporary world. Her film Seeing Prague (2018) won first place in the competition My Street Films 2018. In 2020, together with Andreas Gajdošík, she founded the online project Nejlepší z možných výzkumů (The Best Possible Research), which deals with the experimental possibilities of researching hard-to-investigate social phenomena and social strata. She was one of the initiators of the atelier Mothers Artlovers at the first edition of the biennale Matter of Art.

Tereza Stejskalová is a curator and theoretician who deals with (post-)socialist visual culture from a feminist and postcolonial perspective. In recent years she has been exploring the film productions of visiting students from the countries of the Global South in Czechoslovakia between 1948 and 1989. The results of this research have been exhibited in a number of places: tranzit.sk (2016), the National Gallery in Prague (2017), Framer Framed in Amsterdam (2017), Kunstraum Kreuzberg/Bethanien (2017), and others. In 2020 she co-curated the first edition of the biennale Matter of Art. From 2012 to 2015 she worked as an editor for the cultural biweekly A2, and in 2013 she co-founded A2larm.cz, where she was the project manager from 2013 to 2014. She has worked for tranzit.cz as a curator since 2015. She lives and works in Prague.

A series of streamed discussions will introduce the practice of the artists who will create new commissioned artworks for the second edition of the biennale Matter of Art, which will take place in 2022 in Prague. Over the course of four meetings between the 13th and 21st of December 2021, artists Hera Büyüktaşcıyan, Alina Kleytman, Marie Lukáčová, Bára Šimková, and Sina Seifee will engage in discussions with the members of the biennale’s curatorial working group, Rado Ištok, Piotr Sikora, Renan Laru-an, and Tereza Stejskalová. The discussions will be streamed live on the Instagram profile of Matter of Art. The discussions are a part of the long-term activities of the artists in collaboration with the organizing institution tranzit.cz, which hosted the participating artists in a creative residency program in Prague in 2021. In the discussions, the artists will focus not only on the context of their artistic practices but also on the commissioned projects that they began developing during their month-long residencies in Prague, which will be presented to the public at the upcoming biennale. The discussions will take place in English, without subtitles.

tranzit.cz & Matter of Art artistic and curatorial residence program is supported by ERSTE Foundation (main partner of tranzit.cz), EEA Grants, Ministry of Culture Czech Republic, City of Prague, EUNIC Global, Goethe–Institut Prague, Instituto Cervantes Prague, French Institute Prague, and Czech Centres.