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Darina Alster & Jan Matýsek
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Darina Alster is an intermedia artist, performer and techno-wizard. She works with new forms of performance with staged elements, costumes and site specific situational scenography. The themes of the performances range from personal mystical-bodily experiences of temporality and powerful emotions to highly engaged commentaries on globally shared aspects of contemporary world, often silenced or tabooed. She works with the tension between apparent rationality of contemporary technologies and the irrationality of archaic media such as astrology and tarot, myths and fairy tales, and other kinds of religious and secular archetypes. Often she deals with archives of personal and social and institutional memory or the memory of specific place, which she perceives in personal and political contexts. She addresses social themes through personal bodily experience, which, when grasped as a generational testimony, takes on social and critical overlaps. The personal thus becomes political. Since 2016, she cares of the Mothers Artlovers collective, and since 2019, together with Kateřina Olivová, she has been the head of the New Media Studio 2 at the Academy of Fine Arts in Prague.
Jan Matýsek (1994) is a visual artist and set designer. He creates his own stories and myths from external and internal sensations and explains the phenomena between heaven and earth through their associations and causality. He combines the themes of transhumanism, ecofeminism and corporeality with the psychotherapeutic means of hypnosis and incantation. He creates mostly videos with an emphasis on the imagery of the unconscious. He sets the videos in video installations – imaginal, ritual spaces and through direct communication with the audience he mediates their transformation or transcendence on an inner level. He is inspired by shamanic practices of initiation, initiation and awareness of the hidden. He has studied at the feminist New Media Studio 2 at the Academy of Performing Arts in Prague, the studio of scenography at the JAMU in Brno and an internship at the experimental film studio at the UdK in Berlin. He worked as a curator at Umakart gallery in Brno. Since February 2023 he has been working as an assistant professor at the New Media 2 studio at the Academy of Fine Arts in Prague.