Prof. Mgr. A. Lenka Klodová, Ph.D.

Visual artist, performer and Head of the Body Design Studio at the Faculty of Fine Arts, Brno University of Technology

Lenka Klodová is one of the most prominent figures in Czech contemporary art who has long and systematically explored the themes of the human body, intimacy and physicality. In both her artistic practice and teaching, she challenges established conventions and explores themes such as gender roles, motherhood, eroticism, pornography and the experience of an ageing and non-conforming body.

At the Summer School on Critical Approaches to Nudity, she leads practical and theoretical explorations of the body as a medium in its own right, a political tool and a space for personal emancipation.

What she brings to the summer school’s teaching:

• The body as a medium and material: Drawing on her many years’ experience running the Body Design Studio, she teaches students how to work with nudity consciously, without resorting to clichés, and with an awareness of its context within visual culture.
• Critical deconstruction of objectification: She helps participants view nudity beyond the framework of a commercial or purely aesthetic perspective (the ‘male gaze’). She offers ways to restore the naked body’s own subjectivity and voice.
• Working with boundaries and taboos: It creates a safe yet stimulating space for exploring social taboos associated with nudity, sexuality and intimacy.
• Performative methods: It combines theoretical reflection with practical exercises, performance art and physical expression.
• Ethics, care and institutional support: It imparts practical and theoretical know-how regarding working with performers – from establishing fair conditions, a safe space, contracts and consent, to caring for participants during long-lasting or physically demanding events.
• Working with the Audience, Space and Institutional Limits: This module explores themes of interaction between the naked body and visitors to the gallery space. It addresses issues of age appropriateness, institutionalised censorship, institutional comfort and the mediation of ‘uncomfortable’ or taboo content.

About the lecturer:

Lenka Klodová is a visual artist, performer, sculptor and teacher who has been active on the Czech art scene since the 1990s. The central motif of her work is the human body, which she perceives within an extended field and via multi-layered contexts moving beyond its physical boundaries into the social and political sphere. She works with the themes of intimacy, sexuality, motherhood and interpersonal relationships. She focuses on social constructs and stereotypes, which she reflects upon from a gender-based perspective, and explores the dynamics, conduct, and situations that ensue from given social structures. Her work is often of an ambivalent and subversive character, highlighting the complexity and ambiguity of established categories, opinions and beliefs. In 2007 Klodová took up a teaching post. To begin with, along with Vlasta Čiháková-Noshiro she lectured in the Philosophy of Postmodernism and Gender at the Faculty of Fine Arts of the Brno University of Technology. The course was taught at the Body Design Studio headed at that time by Jana Preková. A year later Preková invited Klodová to teach her own porn studies course at the studio as an offshoot of her doctoral project. Klodová examined the ways of depicting the human body, sexuality and interpersonal relationships, while taking account of the context of eroticism from the perspective of art history and the very topic of nudity in art.

In 2010 Klodová replaced Jana Preková as head of the Body Design Studio. When putting together a course at the studio, Klodová focused on interdisciplinarity and the overlaps between art, the humanities and the natural sciences. She focused on a social reflection viewed through the human body as the primary starting point. Lenka Klodová is the founder and curator of the Festival of Naked Forms, which took place for the first time in 2015 in the premises of a former paper mill in Vrané nad Vltavou. The aim of the festival was to encourage a reflection upon naked situations in the sphere of Czech performance.

MgA. Karolina Raimund

Visual artist, curator and educator specialising in body design, performance and photography; Head of the Body Design Studio at the Faculty of Fine Arts, Brno University of Technology

Karolína Raimund is an artist, curator and educator whose practice has long been dedicated to themes of corporeality, identity, feminist and queer approaches, and the politics of the body. In her own work, she naturally combines the medium of photography with body design, performance, action art and object-based art. She approaches these themes with ethical urgency, yet also with subtle ironic humour and analytical detachment.

At the Summer School of Critical Photographic Practice with Nudity, she oversees the integration of theoretical concepts with the practical photographic process. She teaches how to photograph nudity as a living medium, an expression of bodily autonomy and a space for exploring both personal and collective identity.

What she brings to the summer school’s teaching:

• Photography as a record of physical action and performance: It views photography not merely as a static capture of a subject, but as a documentation of a process, gestures, interventions and the living relationship between the photographer and the photographed body.
• Critique of visual stereotypes and feminist/queer perspectives: She helps participants view nudity beyond the established clichés of visual culture, the commercial objectifying gaze (‘male gaze’) or traditional notions of beauty.
• Bodily experience, identity and space: It draws on experience with body design and the exploration of bodies within their context. It provides tools for composing the nude body in a photograph in relation to its surroundings and social context.
• An ethical approach and reflection on the photographer’s role: It creates a safe space for conscious collaboration both in front of and behind the camera. It teaches how to conduct a photographic dialogue based on respect, sensitivity to boundaries and mutual agreement regarding the representation of the human body.

About the lecturer:

Karolina Raimund is an artist, curator and pedagogue who, in her artistic and pedagogical practice, has long been dedicated to body design and performance, in which she addresses feminist and queerness themes. Identitarian questions connected with physicality in her work are complemented by environmentally committed projects.

Karolína is an active participant in artistic life in Brno, she is a member of the artistic group Divý tvor focused on photographic portraits and empathic photography. She is the curator of the Umakart gallery in Brno.

Together with Lenka Klodová, Karolína runs the Body Design Studio at the Faculty of Fine Arts BUT in Brno. She is a regular photographer of FNAF, in which she also participates as a co-curator of the FNAF fashion section.

For traveling FNAF, he is preparing the concept, design and implementation of the FNAF docufashion exhibition. Her approach to clothing objects is very sculptural and performative.

Mgr. Alexandra Tamášová, Ph.D.

Curator, art historian and theorist specialising in corporeality, feminist art and ecofeminism

Alexandra Tamášová is one of the leading figures on the Czech and Slovak art history scene. She has long specialised in modern and contemporary art, with a strong focus on feminist and queer theories, corporeality, sexuality, motherhood and ecofeminism. As a long-standing curator of the collections of modern and contemporary art at the Slovak National Gallery (SNG), she has been behind a number of landmark and critically acclaimed exhibition projects (e.g. Dream x Reality, The Heart of a Dead Dog, and retrospective and thematic exhibitions dedicated to women’s art and corporeality).

At the Summer School on Critical Art-Historical Approaches to Nudity, she provides the art-historical and theoretical-critical framework. She helps participants to deconstruct traditional art-historical canons and to view nudity in art history as a phenomenon of power, society and gender.

What she brings to the summer school’s teaching:

• A critical deconstruction of the art-historical canon: She reveals how the nude model (particularly the female nude) has been constructed in art history through the ‘male gaze’, and offers an alternative reading of the history of visual culture through feminist and queer lenses.
• The body as a political and emancipatory tool: Using examples from Czech, Slovak and international art, it illustrates the transformation of nudity – from a passive object of aesthetic consumption to an active medium of protest, self-discovery and personal freedom.
• Curatorial and analytical practice: It imparts skills on how to write about and reflect on nudity in art, and how to exhibit it whilst taking into account today’s ethical, social and socio-cultural challenges.
• Links to ecofeminism and intimacy: It connects themes of corporeality with broader ecological, care-based and relational contexts that redefine the myriad possibilities of the naked body in contemporary art.

About the lecturer:

Alexandra Tamášová, historian, art critic and curator. She studied art history and theory at the Faculty of Philosophy, Trnava University in Trnava (2009), where she also completed her doctoral studies (2012). She has been working at the Slovak National Gallery since 2012, and has served as curator of the Modern and Contemporary Art Collections since 2016. She is responsible for the Collection of Modern and Contemporary Prints and the Collection of Naïve Art. Her work focuses on contemporary art, with an emphasis on themes of nature, the body and physicality, marginalised groups and expanded consciousness. At the SNG, she has organised several exhibitions, including an exhibition exploring the phenomenon of naïve art and art brut, *Between Idyll and Drama* (2013, co-curated with Katarína Čierna), an exhibition on the relationship between humans and nature, *Into the Wilderness* (2019), and most recently, together with Petra Hanáková, the monographic exhibition *Marko Blažo: The Whole Person* (16 February to 19 May 2024). She also curates exhibitions at other institutions and private galleries, writes specialist articles and reviews, moderates discussions and the SNG podcast, and organises the Modra Cabaret.

Mgr. Antonín Brinda

Curator, performer, live art theorist and researcher in the field of performance art

Antonín Brinda is a curator, artist and researcher who has long specialised in performance art, process-oriented and action art, dance and performative practices within an international context. As a co-curator and organiser, he has contributed to a number of festivals and platforms focused on live art (e.g. Pomalé občerstvení, projects for the Bazaar Festival, and international residency and curatorial platforms).

At the Summer School of Critical Curatorial Practice with Nudity, he oversees a programme focusing on curatorship and the specific ethical, spatial and production challenges that nudity presents in curatorial practice.

What he brings to the summer school’s teaching:

• Curating live art and physical presence: She focuses on how to work curatorially with the naked body.
• Mediating and sharing performative experience: She explores formats that help audiences understand the performance they are watching, and examines ways of talking about and questioning the performance. It proposes new forms of performance animation.
• Documentation and the afterlife of physical action: It examines how to curate recorded documentation (photographs, video, props, oral history) of nude performances and how to exhibit these traces ethically and critically.

About the lecturer:

Antonín Brinda has gained his education in different fields of art and art theory (General Art Studies; Film Studies; Site-Specific Performance; Live Art and Performance Studies; Architecture and Urban Research) in Brno, Prague, Tallinn, Helsinki and Istanbul.Apart from an artist, Brinda is also an organizer/curator of various (performance) art events and festivals. Examples of festivals include Performance Crossings (Prague, CZ), Performensk (Minsk, BY), Wärmflasche (Berlin, DE - Vernéřovice, CZ), Perform - or not (Tallinn, EE). He was a guest curator of Carbonarium (Kyiv, UA) and New Performance Turku Festival (Turku, FI). Since 2021, Brinda is co-running a series of performance events SPA - Studio Performance Art in Prague and since 2023 he is one of the curators of Prague’s MeetFactory Artists-in-Residence programme.

Since 2011, his performances were presented in various galleries and festivals as well as in less traditional venues within Europe, Asia and North America. Examples of events/platforms where Antonín performed include Asiatopia (Nakhon Pathom, TH), Blurborders Performance Art eXchange (Bangkok and Phatthalung, TH), Nomadic Red Corner and 976 Gallery (Ulaanbaatar, MN), Cattle Depot Artist Village (Hong Kong, HK), Air Hue (Hue, VD), Artbat Fest (Almaty, KZ), Trash Fest (Bishkek, KG), Absence Space (Tainan, TW), {\\}() {\\}∆‡!(){\\} (Chicago, US), ARé Fest (Yerevan, AM), 13festivalen (Gothenburg, SE), Supermarket Art Fair (Stockholm, SE), Sofia Underground (Sofia, BG), LAPSody (Helsinki, FI), A! Performance Festival (Akureyri, IS), Istanbul Performance Art and Performistanbul (Istanbul, TR), Riga Performance Days (Riga, LV), Artifex (Moscow, RU), Performance Festival Malamut (Ostrava, CZ) or Festival of Naked Forms (Prauge, CZ).

MgA. Kača Olivová, Ph.D.

Performer, visual artist, curator and head of the New Media Studio 2 at the Academy of Fine Arts in Prague.

Kača Olivová is one of the most prominent figures in contemporary Czech performance art. In her work, she has long explored themes of physicality, feminism, radical self-love (body positivity), sexuality, motherhood, nudity and the breaking down of social taboos. She is co-founder of the radical-emancipatory platform Mothers Artlovers and the creator of countless performances, festival interventions and participatory projects both at home and abroad.

At the Summer School of Critical Performative Work with Nudity, she leads sessions on live performance, radical physicality and the practical exploration of nudity as a tool for celebration, protest, vulnerability and political expression.

What she brings to the summer school’s teaching:

• Nudity as a radical and liberating gesture: She teaches how to approach nudity in performance without shame, embarrassment or melodrama – as a liberating medium capable of subverting the audience’s expectations and challenging normative notions of the ‘perfect’ or ‘acceptable’ body.
• Space for non-conforming and diverse bodies: She actively explores themes of fat acceptance, age, maternal bodies and all forms of otherness. She helps participants find strength and autonomy in their own, authentic bodies.
• Working with emotions, humour and hyperbole: It demonstrates that critical engagement with nudity need not be solely serious or coldly academic. It utilises the aesthetics of pop culture, kitsch, joy, playfulness and hyperbole as effective strategies for addressing difficult social issues.
• The intensity of live performance and interaction with the audience: It imparts practical skills on how to work with the energy of the space, how to engage with the audience, and how to manage both the vulnerability and the power that live performances in the nude bring.

About the lecturer:

Kača Olivová initially studied Art History at the Faculty of Arts, Masaryk University in Brno, before moving on to the Body Design Studio at the Faculty of Fine Arts, Brno University of Technology. She subsequently completed her studies with a doctoral thesis on the subject of motherhood and art. Together with Darina Alster, she heads the New Media 2 Studio at the Academy of Fine Arts in Prague, where she is heavily involved in teaching, leading author-led workshops and delivering lectures focusing on physicality, performance art and a safe environment within the art world. She is also the author and co-author of influential publications – the book *Milk and Honey*, which formed part of her doctoral project, and the anthology *Transformations of Masculinities*. She has founded several activist and artistic groups – the Breastfeeding Guerrilla and the Brno branch of Mothers Artlovers. She is also active as a curator of contemporary art with a focus on performance, particularly through the independent Umakart Gallery in Brno. She often creates works together with her partner Alois Stratil and her son Lev, with a view to exploring the experiences arising from parenthood.