Advanced Lecture and Open Research Workshop:
Anetta Mona Chișa, Markéta Dolejšová, Irina Gheorghe
- 11:00 – 13:00 Advanced Lecture and Discussions
- 13:00 – 15:00 Lunch Break
- 15:00 – 17:00 Open Research Workshop
RENDEZVOUS PROBLEM
(advanced lecture)
Two people agree to meet in a park they have never visited before. The park is huge. They cannot find each other. Each must decide: wait or walk?
This is a version of the Rendezvous Problem, first posed informally by mathematician Steve Alpern in 1976. Fifty years later, many of its variants remain unsolved. What strategies maximise the probability of meeting? Who moves, who waits, and how can two parties coordinate without knowing where the other is?
The lecture takes this mathematical problem as a framework for thinking about encounters between art and other disciplines. Can art and science actually meet, or do they merely pass one another in an infinite park?
Unfolding through various spatial situations and configurations, the performative lecture asks how an encounter is produced and when waiting, wandering, or returning might constitute a strategy rather than a failure to arrive.
HOW TO USE YOUR EYES*
(open research workshop)
hrough a series of simple exercises in observation, attention and visual response, participants will test different ways of looking and noticing. Rather than aiming at interpretation or correct description, the workshop asks what happens when familiar habits of perception are interrupted, prolonged or displaced. Drawing, movement, annotation and other forms of non-verbal response may become tools for exploring what can be learned through sustained attention, and what becomes perceptible when language temporarily stops organising the encounter.
*How to Use Your Eyes is the title of a book by James Elkins published in 2000.
Biography
Anetta Mona Chișa is an artist working across installation, sculpture, video, performance and text, both individually and through long-term collaborations. Her practice grows from sustained engagement with materials—including plaster, asphalt, tin and dust—which she approaches as agents with their own behaviours, durations and forms of resistance. She describes this embodied mode of material knowledge as synhylic experience. Her work explores how matter participates in shaping perception, agency, labour and sociopolitical relations. Rather than merely representing the world, art becomes for her a way of entering into relation with it, enabling intuitive leaps, alternative visions and heightened receptivity to the richness of matter and life. She serves as Vice-Rector for Internationalisation and Research at the Academy of Fine Arts in Prague. Her work has been presented at the Romanian Pavilion of the 54th Venice Biennale, Kunsthalle Bratislava, n.b.k. Berlin, GAK Bremen, Cukrarna Ljubljana, mumok Vienna, Schirn Kunsthalle Frankfurt, MOCA Miami and The Power Plant Toronto, among others.
Markéta Dolejšová is a practice-based researcher working with multispecies ecologies and feral methodologies, at the intersections of art, design, and environmental inquiry. She is currently affiliated as an Assistant Professor at The Academy of Fine Arts in Prague where she acts as the Head of Doctoral Research Department and leads the Multispecies Ecologies & Practices research group. She co-founded several art and design research initiatives including the Uroboros festival, the Open Forest Collective, the Feeding Food Futures network, and the Ars Biologica Independent Studies programme. In 2020-22, she worked with the CreaTures – Creative Practices for Transformational Futures consortium, where she led the Laboratory of Experimental Productions.
Irina Gheorghe is an artist who works primarily with performance, in combination with installation, photography, film or drawing. Her work addresses themes such as absence, displacement and disappearance, often engaging with entities or spaces inaccessible to observation through ephemeral artistic media. She also works as part of The Bureau of Melodramatic Research. She currently teaches at the Academy of Fine Arts in Prague, where she leads the Artistic Research Department LARGE and coordinates the Alien Languages Research Group. Her work was shown at the Kunstverein am Rosa-Luxemburg-Platz Berlin, Künstlerhaus Bremen, Suprainfinit Gallery Bucharest, Swimming Pool Sofia, Ivan Gallery Bucharest, National Museum of Contemporary Art Bucharest, Centre for Contemporary Art Derry, Glasgow International, Pratt Manhattan Gallery New York, Times Museum Guangzhou, HOME Manchester, Salonul de Proiecte Bucharest, Contemporary Art Centre Vilnius, among others.