SURUVKA IS OK. AND EMIL TOO. Malamut Performance Art Festival, Ostrava 2013

Małgorzata Kaźmierczak, 2014-01-18

Malamut Performance Art Festival in Ostrava is organised and curated by Jiri Suruvka – an icon of European performance art. Someone, whom artists trust not to use their art to build his own position. Suruvka is a whimsical, demanding and unpredictable person, but entirely open to every form of artistic message. And Malamut 2013 in Ostrava was exactly so. The last festival clearly highlighted two issues – the failure of performance art education and a slow departure away from the traditional, old school approach of this kind of art. Paradoxically – a “traditional” version of performance was presented mainly by young artists, infatuated with their professors and mentors. Loose impressions and gestures in the style of the Black Market artists were presented in large numbers by Thomas Ruller’s students from Brno and were not too interesting. One could not feel any passion in their performances although the younger artists were very excited with the actions that they presented in the difficult conditions of the mine – Dul Hlubina, where the festival took place.

Among the artists who used a classic performance art approach certainly very interesting was the performance by Jozsef Juhasz, who started his piece enclosed in a wooden box from inside which one could only hear loud bangs. After some time the public themselves started to dismantled the box in order to save the artist inside, who was dressed in an elegant suit and a bow tie and rhythmically banged his head against the wood. Interesting also was the action by Peter Rosvik from Finland who used the well known props of performance art – paints, beer bottles and roses which he stapled to his skin. His performance, short, concise and visually attractive dealt with his own personal problem – his addiction to alcohol. Sometimes performances based on the personal experiences of artists are very often banal, however this time through the conciseness of the form, it resulted in a successful presentation. On the opposite side of the spectrum there was a performance by Nastja Sade Ronkko, which by its complicated structure and the large number of props and objects disorientated the viewers. The action probably referred to the negative attitude of the artist towards the killing of animals. A master of performances in the good old style of the 80s was as always Paweł Kwaśniewski, whose characteristics are the fact that he tells the same short story multiple times, in which usually one sentence is repeated as a chorus. One never quite knows whether the story is true or not, but the fact that he repeats it many times makes it absolutely convincing and it becomes trustworthy. Paweł Kwaśniewski varies from other performance artists because he is unafraid of “failures” during his performances. This time it turned out that the gesture marking the structure of the performance – the scattering of china cups one by one – was far too predictable for the public and the artist finished the performance earlier than he had planned.


Lenka Klodova is an artist who along with a few other female artists in the world is able to illustrate gender issues in a conscious and courageous way. The artist asked two people to hold a piece of cardboard with a hole which made it appear like a TV and she herself performed “on the screen” in a few scenes during a very simple action. The artist shaved her legs and pubic area using two hand puppets. In the end she announced a “sequel” in which she would shave her armpits. The action naturally provoked enthusiasm amongst male viewers and at the same time the artist ruthlessly ridiculed their interest. Peter Baren plays on words. This time he gave up the complicated structure of his usual performance and decided instead to perform in a public space. The artist walked slowly in theatrical motion around Ostrava with a boomerang on which he wrote two words in Czech: “fight” and “loss”. A witty action was proposed by Jerzy Kosałka, who wrote on a large banner in red paint: “Suruvka is OK. And Emil, too”, and then uncovered a plaque with the same text. An element which integrated the entire festival were the concerts by the famous group Artbus from Kraków, devised by Piotr Lutyński.

Through the example of the Malamut Festival one can see however that artists more and more often resign from the classic formula of a “presentation” in front of the public in favour of an interaction and social actions – interventions. Vladimir Havlik for ex ample organised a “bottle top cap game” in front of a casino on the Masaryk Square. Frantisek Lozinski with other artists and students painted the portraits of the passers-by on the Charles’s Bridge at the Shopping Mall. Martin Zet initiated the creation of a “mass grave” into which people laid down. Some performances however were more complicated. Omar Ghayatt uses his theatrical experience. In Ostrava he presented Casting – an action which he had presented earlier during Interakcje 2013 in Piotrków Trybunalski. In the performance with the help of a jury which he had earlier chosen, he selected among the public two women to play the roles of his wife and a lover, as well as the lover’s husband. Then they were supposed to play a triangle love scene directed by the artist, who wanted to provoke the public to react impulsively by showing the roles which each of us may play in life. In Ostrava, more than earlier in Piotrków, he stressed the fact that he is an Arab, a Muslim, a “stranger” in Europe and in this way he tried to provoke an even greater emotion and aggression from the participating “actors”. In spite of the fact that it was only a convention, it was interesting to see how easily people use stereotypical arguments when addressing all “different ones”.

Dariusz Fodczuk always encourages the public to enter into a play which engages all of them and which generates the rhythm and structure of the performance. This time he used two key words: Cleanliness and Nothing (Rien). RIEN was the word which Jean Pierre Ive – an artist from Marseille wrote in various places and this inspired Fodczuk, who wrote it on the floor using a whipped cream spray and then cleaned it away using his clothes – first undressing and then putting the wet creamy clothes back on himself. This apparently humorous gesture is loaded with philosophical reflections on nothingness. Being and nothingness according to Sartre’s philosophy are two complementary elements of a human being – being in itself – a subject and being for oneself – consciousness (that is – nothingness). Games such as making a “wave” or rhythmically puncturing balloons etc. give the viewers no time to wonder about the meaning of what the artist is talking about during the performance. The reflection may however come later.


Many actions during the last festival had the character of petty interventions or actions based on one idea such as the placing of pink paint on tram tracks (Jiři Černicky) or the corny “breakfast on the grass” (Silvie Kudelová, Hana Čichoňova). Klaus Richer’s students created “living sculptures” in various places around the town. These kinds of individual gestures caused the festival to revolve around the town and spread its energy around. They were more or less successful, one could come up with an endless number of them. The question however is: what for?

We don’t need to ask such a question in the case of actions by Milan Kohout, who when performing in Ostrava always makes art interventions based on the very concrete reality of the place. This time Milan Kohout went to a session of the town council. Using the designated time for public interaction with the chairman of the council, the artist proposed to privatise his own body. He highlighted an absurd situation in the town in which, according to him, the absurdities of privatisation happen every day. But why to make such an intervention? The best answer to this question was the face of the absolutely confused chairman of the Ostrava town council.

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