The European Performance Art Festival EPAF 2011 will open in the Centre for Contemporary Art Ujazdowski Castle for the sixth time. Each year the festival adopts a different formula and gathers performance artists from around the world. Each successive edition attempts to showcase new trends and paths of evolution of the genre, also through the output of young artists. This year’s edition will see fifteen artists from ten countries; most of them have been identified through the openEPAF programme, intended for budding artists. The overarching idea of the oncoming will be to capture the relationship between artists with Eastern and Western cultural background and representing those cultures in their work. The meeting of young and middle generation artists, whose creation is embedded in different cultures, is an opportunity of creating a common platform of dialogue and mutual inspiration. Juxtaposition of various artistic attitudes is a source of meditation on what is distinct and what is not in the manner of perception of not only art, but of the world.
The Chinese programme of the festival will feature three artists. Chen Jin, in parallel to her artistic pursuits, also works as a curator for the OPEN festival; it has continued uninterrupted for 12 years, initially in Beijing and now in Shanghai. He Chengyao is one of the first artists in China that spearheaded the artistic debate on the problem of femininity and nudity; she took part in the Global Feminism exhibition in the Brooklyn Museum in 2007. Cui Tao represents the young generation of performance artists in China. Also Cai Qing from Singapore will perform as a guest artist.
The open programme – openEPAF – is varied in terms of the media selected by artists for artistic expression. Audiences will watch performances based solely on the exploration of artist’s carnal dimension, and such, where his or her action will be combined with technology.
During the festival, performances will occur in parallel with a theoretical programme, involving meetings and discussions with artists, critics and art historians, as well as shows and performance projections.
