The Czech performance festival FNAF is celebrating its 10th anniversary in Lviv

“Days of Performance Art. School of Performance” will take place from June 18 to 22. This year, the festival program is based on the experience of the Czech project FNAF (Festival of Naked Forms), which explores the body, corporeality and various forms of their expression through a visual sign. The theme of the five-day meeting of Czech and Ukrainian performers is “Anxiety in the Body”.

The festival will start on June 18 at 18:00 with the opening of a travelling exhibition of documentation for the 10th anniversary of the FNAF performance festival in the gallery of Art Center “Dzyga”. For five days, experienced and young artists from the Czech Republic – Antonín BRINDA, Sara WOLLASCH, Matyáš DYNKA, Michal DURDA, Lenka KLODOVÁ, Adam MICHÁLEK, Karolína RAIMUND and from Ukraine — Andriy HELYTOVYCH, Natalia LISOVA, Illia TURYHIN, Khrystyna SILIVON, Olga CHYHRYK, Yuriy SHTAIDA will create performances in the space of “Dzyga” and the Theatre Centre “Word and Voice”. All shows are free for viewing.

“School of Performance” will take place at the Lviv National Academy of Arts in the Contemporary Art Practices Department. Workshops will be led by professional Czech performers Lenka KLODOVÁ, Antonin BRINDA, Adam MICHÁLEK. The workshops will be concluded by the performances on June 22 at Dzyga Gallery.

“When the body is in a state of anxiety, physical, mental and, in particular, creative processes are blocked. Anxiety, taking over the body, creates fears, numbness, defenselessness in it, the instincts of self-preservation manifest themselves more acutely.

Over the past two years of full-scale active and continuous war, Ukrainian territory has turned from a space delineated by a border and law into a living, vulnerable, breathing organism. It is full of wounds, he suffers every day and at the same time he heals, he longs for healing and justice. This organism is people. People are tired but they are building their lives step by step by action, faith, spirit and body.

We manifest the continuity visually through the body, we create a sign, an impulse, a message with the body. Its presence brings us closer to biological, social, and political spheres.

And what is this body like today? What did it become? How do we feel it from the inside, and how is it seen from the outside?”

Curators: Lenka Klodova from the Czech Republic and Yaryna Shumska from Ukraine. Coordinators: Lida Savchenko-Duda, Vlodko Kaufman.

This event is part of the “Travelling FNAF” project, which celebrates ten years of FNAF (Festival of Nude Forms) and is supported by the Ministry of Culture of the Czech Republic and the Faculty of Fine Arts of the Brno University of Technology.

Organizers and partners in Lviv: Department of Contemporary Art Practices of the Lviv National Academy of Arts, Institute of Cultural Strategy, Art Center “Dzyga”, Theater Center “Word and Voice”.