The annual Brno Art Week festival will take place in Brno next week, 22-28 April, connecting galleries and public spaces with a focus on visual contemporary arts. This year the main questions of the festival will revolve around how to mediate visual art invisibly, by hearing, and how to work with sound in art.
The festival is organised by TIC Brno, in collaboration with the Art Education department of Masaryk University and with the participation of various museums and universities. It is aimed at both art community representatives and experts who already know what to see, and visitors with no previous experience.
This year will see a new feature, two audio guides created by students of the Education faculty. These Tour de Galleries will consist of experiential walks through Brno’s galleries and fine art in public spaces using the “Echoes” mobile application. One path will lead from the Museum of Roma Culture to the House of Arts in Malinovského náměstí, while the other goes from the Umakart Gallery on Lidická to the Moravian Gallery Artoteka, in the Pražák Palace.
An additional audio track was made by artist Pavel Karous, which focused on the lives of important women from Brno, such as anti-fascist Marie Kudeříková, sculptor Sylva Lacinová, and the founders of the Vesna women’s shelter Maria Steyskalova and Eliška Machová.
These guided walks will also be available after the end of the festival, though for now only in Czech.
The House of Arts exhibitions will focus on sound art, with musical performances, live broadcasts, and audiovisual performances. On 25 and 26 April, the hall of the Museum of Applied Arts will host a series of podcasts regarding the question of visual arts from the perspective of dramaturgs, sound engineers, PR, galleries, and universities. The second of these events on 26 April will be followed by the Art Week Afterparty, which is open to the general public.
Expat-friendly events include a “sculpture-grilling” event at the Bohunice campus on 22 April at noon, where discussion about art will merge with eating; the body-art performance of Faculty of Education students in the Faculty courtyard around the “Gate of Knowledge” sculpture on 24 April at 10am; and the art market by the Faculty of Fine Arts (FaVU), on 24 April at 2pm, where it will be possible to buy art produced by the faculty’s students.
Other highlights for English speakers will include a creative meeting in Arnold villa on 25 April at 2pm, when the villa’s ornamentation will be under analysis, and a meeting at Masaryk University Rectorate on 26 April at 1pm, where there will be a display of selected works of art and then a visit to the nearby Pitevna Gallery.
The full program can be found here.
