Happy hour / evening menu from Vasulka’s Kitchen
Presentation of books from Vasulka Kitchen Brno in ArtMap bookstore
The ArtMap bookstore will host a meeting dedicated to the publishing activities of the Center for New Media Art - Vašulka Kitchen Brno, focusing mainly on the processing of the Woody and Steina Vašulka archive. The books and online projects will be presented by Lenka Dolanová and the editors of the Bohuslav Woody Vašulka - Čeleben collection. Poems and prose from his youth by Miloš Vojtěchovský and Antonín Petruželka. Excerpts from Vasulka’s texts will be read and musically interpreted by Josef Jindrák (Polí5 and member of the group Skrytý půvab byrokracie) and singer, trumpeter and poet Zdeněk “Hmyzák” Novák (Ženy, Činna). The evening is prepared on the occasion of the anniversary of the birth of B.W.V.
The English monograph A Dialogue with the Demons of the Tools: Stein and Woody Vašulka, edited by Martin Odehnal and published in 2021, is a revised version of Lenka Dolanová’s original Czech-language publication and to date the only monograph to evaluate the overall work of two personalities who significantly influenced the beginnings of video art and the development of electronic art.
The literary attempts of Bohuslav Woody Vasulka’s youth remained until recently hidden in the archives of the National Gallery of Iceland or in private collections. Under the title Čeleben (referring to the title of one of Vasulka’s poems), the committee was presented in Brno at the end of last year. In the texts, which Vasulka himself arranged in the early 1960s into an inedited collection, we find motifs that he gradually returned to throughout his life: the interconnectedness of violence, death and technology, the joyful and terrifying vision of a world dominated by machines, the relationship between the individual and society, the myth of the romantic artist. The publication is accompanied by photographs from the private archive of the Vasulka family, the archive of Jiří Vanýsek and the collections managed by the Vasulka Kitchen Brno and the Vasulka Foundation in Iceland.