Street Art Residencies

INTERSECTION OF COMICS AND PUBLIC ART

Interview with Michaela Konrad, Austria

Michaela Konrad is coming from the illustration background, and we met through some contacts in our comics art network long ago, at the comics jam of Ligatura festival in Poznan, Poland. However, the way she treats the topics in her work and comics as a medium itself, is trespassing the borders of expectations we usually have from comics as intimate, one-on-one encounter with someone’s narrative approach and sensibility. Michaela is involved in big format exhibitions, electronic arts festivals, and is internationally present in contemporary art galleries, apart from being active member of wider European alternative comics art family. In this short interview, we will try to walk a curious magnifying glass closer over her work, processes and worldviews, in attempt to identify common points of inspiration between these various disciplines. Her painting style is very recognizable and communicative, once seen it becomes engraved in the spectator’s brain, and can illustrate the potential of comics art to become a form public art just like mural painting. We took this intersection as a starting point for this interview.
Questions and intro: Vladimir Palibrk

VP: One of the focal points that are quite common in your artworks, whether longer narratives or paintings/big format installations, is combination of gender-related and space-related topics..where does this come from? Can you tell us a bit about your creative process?

MC: The first artistic project I created was a small, self-published comic book I called Spacelove. It was an ironic soap opera about a love triangle in space. The name of the female protagonist was Olga. Within the following years, I created many different episodes of Spacelove – different in style, format etc. but the scenery was always in Space and there was always Olga, the blonde cosmonaut. Spacelove was inspired by the aesthetics of golden Age Comics like Flash Gordon by Alex Raymond and had been developing into something I could call my alter ego.

Q: Something echoes in your paintings a visual mixture of 1960-s futuristic space era aesthetics in USA, while it is still not very clear is it really past, or future, that is represented in your work..i did notice similar sensibility and atmosphere in few other Austrian artist’s work, such as Dorit Chrysler or Tonto Comics crew..would it be possible to contextualize this somehow? Did you all watch the same cartoons/read same books as kids during the cold war era?

MC: Yes maybe, I am not sure. Maybe we have the same influences. As a child and adolescent I was a very big fan of different television series like Space 2000, Star Trek or Die Mädchen aus dem Weltall, later I read novels of Phillip K. Dick, Aldous Huxley and so on. And I try to understand what the Quantum Theory, the String theory and the Theory of Relativity mean– I have read a lot of books and have been watching obsessively documentaries on these topics. I simply like the idea that time is just another spatial dimension, and that therefore, at least theoretically, everything exists simultaneously.

VP: Can you name your top 4 Austrian artists of today, in any field?

MC: Gottfried Helnwein – he is a star
Tommi Kuehberger (a great comic artist, who rejects to make exhibitions)
Deborah Sengl – great art and great content
Liddy Scheffknecht – I admire her work about time

VP: Your life is of an international/cosmopolitan artist, you spend your time between Tenerife and Vienna..how important or influential is that for your work and inspiration? Where do you find yourself at home on this planet?

MC: I feel at home in Vienna, because I spend a big part of my life there, many of my friends live here and it is the center of my professional life. I have been living in Vienna about 24 years.
My second home is in Tenerife, there is my printmaking studio, my husband, my dog and more friends. And finally there is Graz, where I was born, I grew up there and I have strong bonds there due to family and friends.
So Vienna – Tenerife and Graz are my home bases – this is inspiring because there are always changes. But sometimes it is exhausting, because even in Tenerife we are moving between two places. My aunt told me once that a great grandmother of mine was a Sinti, I don’t know whether this is true or not – but I definitely like to be on the road;-)

VP: If You were never had to do anything with illustration in your life, what would you be? Please describe Michaela Konrad from the parallel universe, if you want of course – what is she doing, where is she living, how does she look like?

MC: I have recently found out that I like interior design and real estates – strange enough. It probably has to do with the fact that I walk a lot with my dog and love to watch buildings – all different types of architecture. And I like to imagine how it is to live in a certain place. But whatever I would do in this Parallel Universe, it would not be from 9 to 5 and with only 5 weeks of vacation.

VP: If you were a planet or a celestial body, which one would you be?
MC: A Sun would be nice.
VP: Imagine you just woke up, and learned that the world ends in 24 hours. Which song is playing in the background?
MC: Always look on the bright side of life …and the Galaxy Song by Monty Python.

VP: Can you tell us about something you are working on at the moment?
MC: I am preparing two projects for the next year. Both have to do with past and present-day prognosis of the future. One project will be a book called Tomorrow and will be published at the Luftschacht Verlag in Austria in May 2022. It is something in between an art catalog and an experimental comic book with augmented reality interventions.
The other project is called Future Retro Ads – I design imaginary future advertising posters. The advertised products are inspired by my research on future trends in society, the new technologies and their socioeconomic effects. The presentation of Future Retro Ads will be on billboards in public spaces.

VP: There is quite challenging year and a half behind us. How do you see the future of the world, having that on mind?
MC: The future of our organized society has been in danger, long before covid appeared. We are overpopulated, uneducated, short term thinking, we use Earth’s resources as if there is no tomorrow…And those, who are designing the future in Silicon Valley and other High-Tech centers in the world must make profit out of their inventions. Regulatory forces are slow and mainly nation-bound, meanwhile transnational companies can act and react quickly. We seem to be stuck in a system which requires limitless growth. In the end we are apes, we have not made a lot of evolutionary progress in the last 70.000 years – but we have an advanced, potentially dangerous technology. And the technological progress is accelerating more and more. This is an explosive combination…You see: I am very
optimistic;-)

More info at: http://michaelakonrad.com

THINGS ARE DEFINITELY GOING TO KEEP CHANGING

interview with NDZW, questions by Vladimir Palibrk, August 2021

NDZW, the artist with almost unpronounceable and quite cryptic name is very active lately at the walls and galleries in Vienna and Austria in general, influencing and being the part of local street art milieu. His iconic visual style, resembling something halfway between newspaper superhero comics of 1950’s and soc-realistic poster stylization from some unknown third world planet, captures your eye at a glance and puts you in intriguing and dynamic mind-quest for meaning within minimalist kinesthetic narratives that are usually told in his artworks. Elliptic combination of symbolic and realistic motives on his paintings bears many layers of potentially allegoric messages, carrying dynamism and tension of torn-apart key pages, turning points of that comics story we all were reading in adolescence, but we just can’t remember at the moment which one exactly…after giving myself blatant permission to follow this free flow of associations after observing his artworks, I will try to pose few questions to NDZW, hoping to introduce us all to his views and, hopefully, generate even more confusion? – VP-

VP: When observing your work, one instantly asks himself, “oh where does this come from?” so I also found myself looped into the naive attempts to decipher your narratives, and the ultimate joy I found actually In giving up and just letting myself being gently triggered to ask/wait for more, next scene, episode…a clue. Can you tell us, what were your first visual experiences as a kid? Where did the first pictures you remember come from? Who were your childhood heroes?

NDZW: The very first visual experiences most likely come from illustrated children’s books. Can’t name any particular titles from the top of my head, but these were most likely Polish and translated Russian fairy tales and rhyme books, as there was no immediate access to western culture in the 80’s. Then there were also comic books – two titles that I still remember pretty vividly are “Kapitan Zbik” and “Kapitan Kloss”. The first one is focused on the adventures and investigations lead by a police captain in socialist Poland. In the second one the main character is a Polish secret agent assuming the identity of a German Abwehr captain during World War 2. It’s actually based on the classic TV series from the 60’s titled “More Than Life At Stake”, the intro music to which is literally engraved in the memory of anyone growing up in Poland between late 60’s and 90’s😉 . Around mid 90’s I was also able to get ahold of some classic comic books like Conan The Barbarian, Batman, Spiderman, etc. and these were definitely a big influence on me later on. In general when I think about the things I used to draw from an early age, it would mostly be knights, warriors and in general characters with these “heroic” qualities somehow attached to them.

VP: Nowadays, where do you see the center of inspiration and activity, between walls, galleries, market? Which part feels most comfortable for you?

NDZW: Ever since I started painting walls, it has become my main focus and all my artistic activity pretty much revolves around that. Most of my “studio” time I dedicate to working on ideas and concepts for wall paintings. I’m not the fastest as far as coming up with new ideas that I find interesting enough to paint outside and I try not to repeat myself, so it can take a couple of weeks before I have something solid enough. My approach doesn’t leave a whole lot of room for freestyling once I’m already in front of the wall, so my sketches are usually pretty close to how I want the final effect to look like.

I release some of my works as prints and sell a small amount of original works through galleries, but I’m not particularly focused on bigger solo exhibitions right now. I feel like painting in public spaces can be much more impactful and get more eyes on what I do than any exhibition, especially given the current pandemic situation.

VP: Everyone has an anecdote from the street life and painting experiences…do you have one to share? Did you ever end up in jail for painting the walls, for example?

NDZW: My first attempt at painting in Vienna actually ended up in getting “caught”. It happened in broad daylight and at a spot where it never seemed to bother anybody, so it was a bit unexpected. Me and some other friends had to spend an afternoon at the police precinct and due to some weird bureaucratic neglect I was the only one who in the end never got a court summon or had to pay a fine or anything. Fast forward 5 years later, when I was about to fly for a festival to Morocco I got held up at the airport, where during passport control it turned out that my case is somehow pending and it seemed like the police were kind of looking for me, but not very hard I guess😉. Luckily I was allowed to leave in the end, but still had to go to court after I came back.

VP: Your top 4 female artists of today and why?

NDZW: Cristina Daura (@cdaura) for her color choices, composition and simplicity. Colleen Barry (@colleenbarryart), because I think she’s one of the best fine art painters currently alive. Eliza Ivanova (@eleeza) for her linework and general mood. Alexandra Fastovets (@han ukafast) for shapes, anatomy and rendering skills.

VP: International aspect of the street art scene – how important for you /or anyone else/, in your opinion, is the ability to travel and see different places, cultures, landscapes?

NDZW: Travelling is crucial for me. It gave me a whole new perspective on my life and a level of appreciation for the possibilities that I have. When in other countries, the seemingly most basic things are the most interesting for me – the music people listen to, their food, clothes or even mundane everyday little activities they engage in. I generally try not to dive deep into grand political narratives, as that makes it easy to lose sight of people as individuals then, yet still in certain places it’s unavoidable and sometimes also pretty sad.

VP: I think Dalai Lama once advised that everyone should at least once a year travel to a place he/she has never been to. If you were to follow this advice, where would you go?

NDZW: This year that would be Brazil and I hope it will still happen😉

VP: If you were to make a movie in future, which topics would you focus on? What would be the title of the movie? Or if the future was to be a movie, how would it be titled?

NDZW: That’s a hard question for me to answer. I imagine that if I ever attempt to make a movie, my process would be somewhat similar to how I work on my paintings and that means a particular topic or theme usually isn’t the starting point. In the beginning I tend to work in a bit of a creative fog, trying to piece things together and see how they work. Even if it starts with one strong idea, it’s usually a visual thing that somehow popped up in my head. So I guess it would probably be one of those artsy silent movies, not a typical plot-driven one. Similarly with the title, it would be something that comes to mind after seeing the finished work, so it’s impossible to say beforehand.

VP: Who are in your opinion, the true heroes of today? If you had three medals in your hands, and could give them to anyone/anywhere, who would that be, and why? What would be written on the medals?

NDZW: As mentioned earlier I’m not too much into grand narratives and giving people medals makes me think of formal pompous ceremonies and things like that. I appreciate anybody who lives their own truth without intentionally hurting other people along the way. Plus, nobody in their right mind should care about getting a medal from me. So, if I had three medals I would pawn them and get myself a plane ticket somewhere nice😉.

VP: What are the biggest fears of today’s people, in your opinion?

NDZW: Job stability, global market collapse, accelerating development of artificial intelligence and what it potentially is capable of.

VP: Hard to avoid this question and topic – How about future? When you close your eyes and ask yourself sincerely, how do you feel about future, what do you think the future will look like?

NDZW: To be honest with you I don’t think about the future too much. More philosophically speaking, the older I get, the less I believe in absolute free will and that also largely influences the way I think about the general direction the world is heading in. But let’s try.

If we’re talking about the near future, I’m still rather calm. Things are definitely going to keep changing and not necessarily in a direction that I’ll be able to fully comprehend. I’m already starting to feel out of touch with some of the technological developments & social media, but I’m also OK with that. I’ll be keeping up as long as I feel like it contributes something positive to my life.

As far as the bigger picture and further time horizon goes, I definitely see a direction where everything is becoming increasingly dumbed down, automated and low-effort-based. There’s also a significant problem with how people get their news and information about the world in general, in effect becoming more and more polarized in particular aspects of life. All of these things combined at least hint at a possibility where things can go rather bad on a global scale. Then again, I still keep meeting smart, kind and generally well-rounded people which might indicate that there’s still hope for this world.

VP: If you could make a phone call to God and say only ONE word in that call, which word would that be?

NDZW: Nice.

IMAGES TAKEN FROM @NDZWDZ INSTAGRAM PROFILE

CO-TRAVELLERS EXHIBITION

Now, this one is a real gem. Believe it or not, we had the opportunity to organize and curate first ever street art exhibition in such contemporary art institution as Museum of Contemporary art of Vojvodina, in Novi Sad, Serbia. Exhibition entitled Saputnici/Co-Travellers/Co-Voyageurs was a result of a short-term residency program organized in Novi Sad with 4 international artists – TKV /Serbia/, Sanja Stojkov /Serbia/, Aleksandar Bunčić /Serbia/ and Polar Bear /France/, and was curated by Vladimir Palibrk. The basic concept was formal focus on stencil techniques and the artworks depicting the portraits of animals that played important roles in the course of human history. Very rich catalog in trilingual SRB/FR/ENG version with lots of texts and artworks can be still accessed at the following link on Museum’s website: http://old.msuv.org/assets/media/publikacije/2018/saputnici.pdf

saputnici katalog Download

This program was made possible thanks to generous support of Institut Francais Serbie-Antenne Novi Sad, Ministry of Culture of Republic of Serbia, and EPK Novi Sad 2021.

Jeff Ross action timelapse

Our friend from USA Jeff Ross, printmaker and collage artist, after silkscreen printing tons of t-shirts and posters for Nirvana and other Sub Pop bands in 1990’s, made his first wall paintings when he arrived to Serbia. During Street Art Residencies program in summer 2019 we documented his action on a wall in Pancevo. Filmed by Marko Segedincev and Vladimir Palibrk, accidentally saved only as low res file from our hard discs. Curated by Vladimir Palibrk.

More info about Jeff: https://www.thestar.com.my/lifestyle/travel/2019/08/16/american-artist-jeff-ross-nirvana-posters-street-art

https://www.facebook.com/JeffRossArt-268062693312372

KASHINK AT TRASHXPLOITATION FESTIVAL

We made a nice connection between our street art network and Trashxploitation film Festival crew, for which we organized a mural workshop with teenagers, led by our friend Kashink. The result was this great mural on the entrance of La Capela alternative cultural center in 10^th Arrondisement in Paris, in June 2017:

Mural workshop with kids at Mara Mandic primary school

Pancevo, Serbia, 10 June 2021

Our dear friend, painter and musician Katie Woznicki from Ohio, USA, has just accomplished this amazing wall with students from Mara Mandic, primary school for kids with special needs in Pancevo, Serbia. The action follows up on the workshops and painting sessions we started at the same spot in 2020 with generous support of Ministry of Culture of Serbia, Institut Francais and Austrian KulturForum Belgrade.

Co-Orbitals mix by Ana Radonja

One more contributor to the Klepsydra expo soundtrack, deep digger and connesseuse of frequencies that send the breeze up your spine and skin, our friend Ana from the global introvert dj’s network has dedicated her attention this time to the resonance of the fluid aura of souls and entities that frequented through mythical rave parties of the legendary squat Klepsydra, while still floating in the hypnothic aether of recent Jupiter/Saturn conjunction. Some of her sets can be checked at the following link: soundcloud.com/ana_radonja/

Klepsydra exhibition was presented by street/collage artist Dzaizku in Parisian alternative culture center “2+1” in December 2020, as an attempt to re-create the ambience of legendary 1980’s squat of the same name.

more info below both in French and English:

DZAIZKU: KLEPSYDRA

21 Rue Jonquoy, 75014 Paris, France

Wednesday, 30 December 2020 from 15:00 h

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La toute dernière installation de Dzaizku, un hommage à la scène techno party parisienne en voie de disparition, plonge ses racines dans l’histoire de l’underground parisien — une histoire qu’il a redécouverte en explorant à pied la capitale française.Vers la fin des années 1980, il a existé dans Paris un squat appelé Klepsydra. L’endroit, lieu d’exil et d’utopie pour groupes alternatifs, était connecté aux catacombes par plusieurs entrées menant à des points opposés de la ville. Il était si bien caché dans le tissu urbain que pendant toute la durée de son existence, il n’a été accessible qu’aux initiés. Imprégné de l’esprit néo-romantique de l’époque, on y entend encore l’écho de séances de musique paranormale, on y ressent tout l’esprit de la renaissance techno-futuriste d’alors.
Parce que personne ne savait exactement ou ne voulait révéler où Klepsydra se trouvait — et si même l’endroit existait vraiment, il est devenu un mythe, une hallucination collective cultivée par des esprits à la sensibilité particulière, avides de trouver un refuge dans un monde hostile.
Trente ans après sa disparition, Klepsydra est un lieu qui ne nous parvient plus que comme une image floue, un héritage collectif et incertain; une intuition qui ne se révèle que lorsqu’on pense à lui suffisamment longtemps. C’est ce qui m’est arrivé un jour de l’automne 2015, quand par le plus grand des hasards je l’ai découvert au cours de mes recherches. Je me suis mis alors à le retrouver dans mes rêves. Il m’apparaissait toujours de la même manière: abandonné, fermé, cadenassé après un dernier effort collectif vers la transe, ses couloirs traversés par les rayons du soleil levant. C’est cette atmosphère onirique que j’essaie de transmettre aux visiteurs dans mon travail.” – DzaizkuEn conformité aux mesures sanitaires liées à l’épidémie de Covid-19, l’installation n’est visible que de la rue, à travers des portes en verre, pour faire signe vers Klepsydra, lieu à l’abandon et endroit vu en rêve, et sans vernissage officiel.

L’exposition est réalisée par le biais de la plateforme Street Art Residencies, qui est soutenue par l’Institut Français de Serbie, le Forum culturel autrichien de Belgrade et le ministère de la Culture de la République de Serbie.

plus de infos, sons et images:
@lefrit
www.facebook.com/dzaizku/

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Dzaizku’s latest installation, as an hommage to disappearing techno party scene of Paris, is inspired by the research of history of Parisian non-formal scenes, during which he stepped on the clues of a squat named Klepsydra, that existed in French capital during the late 1980’s. This space of utopian exile for subculture groups was so well hidden in the urban tissue, with many entrances and exits through catacombs at the totally opposite parts of town, that it remained invisible till the end of its existence to everyone except to the initiated ones. In the spirit of last neo-romantic waves of 1980’s, non-formal art scenes of the time were echoing with stories about paranormal music seances and about the romantic techno-futuristic renaissance of the cult minds of the epoque, who happened to be present in the hallways of Klepsydra during these events. Due to the fact that nobody exactly knew – or never wanted to say publicly – where is this place exactly located or if it even exists for real, Klepsydra has soon achieved the mythological status of collective hallucination, developed in the circle of sensitive minds who were in search of refuge from the hostile reality.”Decades after it’s disappearance, still alive as a blurry image, as an uncertain term in collective symbolic legacy, Klepsydra keeps appearing as an intuitive innuendo in minds of those who keep thinking of her long enough. This happened to me in autumn 2015, when i discovered Klepsydra totally accidentally while i was researching the history of Parisian squat scene, and i started seeing this space often in my dreams – it always appeared as already abandoned and closed, locked up forever after the last exhausting collective trance, with hallways probed by the rays of morning sun. During the installation of my artworks, i will try to transfer at least part of this dream atmosphere to the visitors.” – Dzaizku. In compliance with Covid 19 security measures, the installation is visible only from the street, through the closed glass doors, as an abandoned location from a dream, with no official vernissage.

Exhibition is realized through the Street Art Residencies platform, that is supported by Institut Francais Serbie, Austrian Kultur Forum Belgrade and Ministry of Culture of Republic of Serbia.

Graffitti workshop with design students in Sabac, Serbia

October 2020 – we hosted a small workshop with students of design school in Sabac, Serbia, with generous support of Festival Na Sopstveni Pogon and Jovan Shpira Obradovic accompanied by Aleksandar Buncic. The action was funded by Ministry of Culture of Serbia and NKSS – independent cultural scene of Serbia umbrella network. Video by Darko Pavlovic.

JEANSPEZIAL IN BELGRADE

July 2015

/Greg Bishop, Joris Goulenok, Kermit Dee, accompanied by Belgrade based Linnch, Djuradj Stevanovic, Sretan Bor, EmaEmaEma, RageFreaks, Ligoff/

FOUnding members of legendary French collective Jeanspezial have visited Serbia, accompanied by Parisian dj Kermit Dee of Jekyll et Hyde collective. This was a great opportunity to host a collective expo together with local forces in the windows of Institut Francais Belgrade, as well for a blossoming jam together with Belgrade-based artists in the center of pedestrian zone, followed by dj sets of Kermit Dee and Pann+Onn. /photos/

After Belgrade, JEANSPEZIALS moved some 20km north to city of Pancevo, where another jam took place together with Linnch and Boris Stanic.

Niko Yang – Klepsydra mix

NIKO YANG /Belgrade, Serbia/ – easily moving from the deep melancholic moods of industrial landscapes in toxic suburbs of Belgrade, to the premium hardness of techno and trance, composer and producer Niko Yang is a master craftsman of hypnotic beats, managing to externalize the most subtle personal and collective feelings that many are not even aware of. Rarely playing at any place except his own room, Niko Yang has gained cult status among the circle of very few followers who ever heard his sets. In Decemver 2020, Niko coined this mix for the closing of Klepsydra exhibition in Paris – more info both in English and French can be found below: