Talaya Schmid: Liquid Cuntry / 4th Industrial Art Biennal Pre-opening
11.5.–30.7.2023.
Talaya Schmid’s installation Liquid Cuntry will open at MMSU on 11/5 at 7 pm, as a part of the 4th Biennal of Industrial Art entitled Landscape of desire.
With her space-filling installation Liquid Cuntry, Talaya Schmid creates an immersive environment in MMSU, which celebrates fluidity and change and sets a counterpoint to categorization and borders. Movement through the space is defined by a boardwalk which passes by tufted works, such as Infinite Pool of Love and Juices, and leads to a tent. The space is filled with 20-minute soundscape Body Fluid, a mixture of explicit love poems, personal stories and sounds of water that flows, drips and splashes.
Starting from the word Cunt (eng.), an ancient term that encompasses sexuality and anatomy, external and eternal, including labia, vulva, pudendum, vagina and clitoris, Talaya Schmid’s installation directs attention to female sexual pleasure. Etymologically, Cunt connects to kin, cunning, cognate, cognitive, knowledge, queen, country. In this regard, the seeking of sensual, sexual and societal healing becomes an empowering and political act by exploring the role of intimacy, individual freedom, and artistic practice.
Talaya Schmid is one of the 29 artists participating at 4th Industrial Art Biennale entitled Landscapes of Desire, curated by Paolo Bianchi and Christoph Doswald.
The 4th edition of IAB is structured into 3 geographically separate but thematically interconnected exhibition complexes: Labin with the neighbouring ex-mining town of Raša will function as the starting point and the core of the Biennale, from which it will expand toward Pula and Rijeka.
Talaya Schmid (*1983, Zurich, Switzerland) is a playful feminist artist, activist and art lecturer. She uses tufting, originally a technique for rug-making, to create colourful soft sculptures, sculptural fashion and fluffy murals. She is a performance artist using her voice, sounds and storytelling to create immersive and welcoming spaces. Talaya Schmid is co-founder and curator of Porny Days, an annual film and art festival on sexualities and gender held in Zurich since 2012. In 2013 she finished her Master of Fine Arts at Goldsmith University of London. From 2013 to 2017, she was the publishing director of the comic magazine Strapazin, where she she was an editor and president of the association until 2022. In 2014, Talaya Schmid cooked at the canteen at the F+F School of Art and Design, where she subsequently worked as an assistant and tutor in the Fine Arts program from 2015 to 2019.
More about IAB04:
https://staging.mmsu.hr/en/event/4-bijenale-industrijske-umjetnosti-labin-rasa-pula-rijeka/
Organiser: Labin Art Express XXI
Partner: MMSU Rijeka
With support of Swiss Arts Council Pro Helvetia.
Associates: Branka Cvjetičanin, Kora Girin
Thanks to: Art kino Croatia, Rijeka
Foto: Jules Spinatsch
