Jiri Kovanda: Kissing Through Glass

The 12th edition of the Swiss Sculpture Exhibition Biel/Bienne (Switzerland) is entitled Le Mouvement. The contemporary art exhibition is dedicated to performance in the urban space. Among the invited artists is the Czech, Prague-based Jiri Kovanda, who presents his work Kissing Through Glass, a performance in which he invites passers by to exchange a kiss through a glass window. In Biel/Bienne, the performance took place at the entrance of the Volkshaus (Maison du Peuple).

Jiri Kovanda: Kissing Through Glass. Le Mouvement, 12th Swiss Sculpture Exhibition 2014, Biel/Bienne, Switzerland. Performance, August 30, 2014.

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Exhibition text:

Czech, Prague-based artist, Jiří Kovanda (b. 1953) active since the 70s, has earned an international reputation for his slight, poetic yet very potent gestures, actions and interventions. For Le Mouvement, he presents Kissing Through Glass, a performance in which he invites passersby to exchange a kiss through a glass window. At once joining and dividing lips through glass, this work inevitably speaks to the boundaries between the public and the private, interior and exterior, and most importantly, between bodies themselves.

Czech, Prague-based artist Jiří Kovanda (b. 1953) is perhaps best known for his surreptitious actions in Prague in the second half of the 1970s. Of a secretly performative nature, these actions were conceived as acts of micro-resistance
to the oppressive foreclosure of public space during Soviet occupation.

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