TENT Biennale 2024

TENT BIENNALE brings within our purview of knowledge films, videos, art and animation, which flow outside the circuits of dominant, mainstream and commercial systems. TENT has built connections with individual artists, researchers and curators, located across the Globe, and has focused on work – created by women and other marginalized groups – from the Global South. Gender, body, sexuality, politics, questions of migration, and the crises of our ecology have emerged as some of the key concerns. TENT Biennale 2024 includes 70 films and videos specially curated for the festival from India, Sri Lanka, Vietnam, as well as from Germany, Sweden, Poland, Netherlands, France, Italy, Spain, Greece, S. Korea, Japan, USA, Argentina and New Zealand.

Goethe-Institut Kolkata joins hands with TENT Kolkata to present restored and rare films   of the Austrian artist MARIA LASSNIG on 20 December from 2:00 pm at the biennale.

TENT KOLKATA

TENT Kolkata, an independent and alternative art platform, was initiated by leading artists, filmmakers, and scholars in India, in 2012. It is a space for critical thinking; TENT acts as a bridge between theory and practice, research and doing-art. LITTLE CINEMA INTERNATIONAL FESTIVAL for experimental films and new media art, was launched in 2014 which is an important independent festival of experimental films and art in Eastern India. After five editions, in 2019, the festival was reimagined as TENT BIENNALE to build persuasive links between researchers, artists and filmmakers, and rethink practice as praxis. 

MARIA LASSNIG

Born in Carinthia in Southern Austria in 1919, Maria Lassnig’s (1919 – 2014) work is based on the observation of the physical presence of the body and what she termed ‘body awareness’, or ‘Körpergefühl’ in German. She studied at the Academy of Fine Arts in Vienna in the midst of the Second World War. Then, in post-war Europe, she quickly moved away from the state-approved academic realism in which she was trained, looking to Austria’s own avant-garde past, such as the coloration of Oskar Kokoschka and Egon Schiele’s expressionist treatment of figuration.

Of her artistic process, Lassnig has said: ‘I step in front of the canvas naked, as it were. I have no set purpose, plan, model or photography. I let things happen. But I do have a starting-point, which has come from my realization that the only true reality are my feelings, played out within the confines of my body. They are physiological sensations: a feeling of pressure when I sit or lie down, feelings of tension and senses of spatial extent. These things are quite hard to depict.’

In 1980, Lassnig was awarded a professorship—with a focus on painting and animation film—at the University of Applied Arts in Vienna.