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December 4th, 2008

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Yes bilingual, but no to biennale

Marek Tomin takes art to what some are calling a criminal level

By Stephan Delbos
Staff Writer, The Prague Post
October 8th, 2008 issue

JAN PŘEROVSKÝ/THE PRAGUE POST

After being expelled from Czechoslovakia and living in England from age 10, Marek Tomin says, "The key element of my life is the schizophrenia of living in two languages."

JAN PŘEROVSKÝ/THE PRAGUE POST

"One of the ideas from the start was to use alternative spaces, spaces not dedicated to contemporary art," Tomin says of his exhibit.

JAN PŘEROVSKÝ/THE PRAGUE POST

The Tomin File

Age: 39
Birthplace: Prague
Strangest occupation: Producer of an animal show for Czech TV 2
Favorite authors: Samuel Beckett, James Joyce
Web site: www.tina-b.com

Two words came up repeatedly in my conversation with Marek Tomin: “schizophrenia” and “connections,” an unlikely combination that aptly characterizes Tomin’s life and work.

“The key element of my life is the schizophrenia of living in two languages,” Tomin said. “This connects to everything I try to do.”

And Tomin tries to do a great deal. Curator, translator, journalist, television and film director, even amateur geologist: perhaps the only running theme in Tomin’s résumé is engagement. This engagement — with his own history and with Czech society — has allowed Tomin to unify disparate interests and experiences into significant and varied projects.

But Tomin says he owes his jack-of-all-trades status at least in part to Prague.

“Prague is a web of connections,” he said. “It’s very easy for people here to go from one profession or project to another.”

Tomin’s most recent project is “Transient Boundaries,” an exhibit he is curating at Tina B., Prague’s contemporary art festival, running Sept. 25–Oct. 15. The exhibit, which combines video, sound installations, street art and sculptures, is housed in a derelict building across the street from Veletržní palác in Prague 7, where the National Gallery keeps its collection of modern and contemporary art. Both the location and the condition of the building exemplify the main concepts behind the festival.

“One of the ideas from the start was to use alternative spaces, spaces not dedicated to contemporary art,” Tomin said. “We wanted to take contemporary art out of the gallery context. This building is on the interface between public and private space.”

Tomin explained that Tina B., which is an acronym for “this is not another biennale,” began as a response to the biannual art festival sponsored by the Czech National Gallery but soon gained its own significance.

In the beginning

“Tina B. grew out of the bickering and infighting on the Czech scene in 2005, but now it’s become a nonsequitur,” Tomin said. “That year, there were three separate biennales being held in Prague, which led to a lawsuit from the National Gallery.”

The details of how Tomin started working with Tina B. before the festival’s 2006 debut say as much about him as about Prague’s subculture and the city’s status as an international nexus.

“I came to Tina B. through Minna Pyyhkala, a Finnish photographer and the wife of Pavel Zajíček, one of the key figures of the Czech underground, whose poetry and lyrics I’ve translated for many years,” Tomin said. “Minna said they needed a press officer, someone who could work both in Czech and English.”

It is unsurprising that Tomin’s stories contain intimate references to important dissidents, because Tomin was literally born into the Czech underground.

Tomin’s parents, Zdena Tominová and Julius Tomin, were key figures in the Czech resistance movement of the 1970s. His mother was the spokeswoman for Charter 77, and his father, a philosopher, was one of the first signatories of the now-historic petition by intellectuals and artists protesting the human rights violations of the communist regime.

Tomin recalled that his family was under constant watch by communist authorities and that his parents were frequently harassed and taken in for questioning.

“We were under house arrest for months,” he said. “Twenty-four hours a day there were two policemen on the landing directly outside our flat.”

In 1980, when Tomin was 10, his family was expelled to England, where he was educated in English schools and eventually studied geology at Oxford. Tomin points to his family’s forced expatriation as a crucially formative experience, the beginning of his life between two languages.

“The little boy who grew up to be a little man in England was a different boy than the one who grew up in Czechoslovakia,” he said. “One part of me is always somewhere else.”

When Tomin returned to Prague in 1991, he began working as a fixer and researcher with the BBC. At the same time, he began to translate Czech literature, especially the work of poet and songwriter Pavel Zajíček and Emil Hakl, a contemporary novelist.

Of Kids and Parents, Tomin’s English translation of Hakl’s novel, was published in 2008 by Twisted Spoon, a Prague-based press. Tomin has also published a translated book of Zajíček’s poetry, entitled Time is a Midnight Scream.

“I’ve known Marek a long time and I’ve always been amazed at the energy he brings to his various activities and projects,” said Howard Sidenberg of Twisted Spoon Press.

Tomin says he enjoys the challenge of translating, but sees it more as a way to stay in touch with both sides of his biography and personality.

“If I stopped translating, I’d lose an entire facet of my life,” he said. “It’s a way of interfacing between the two people that I am, the two languages I hold within me.”

At the same time, Tomin is quick to point out that having a simultaneous command of English and Czech is not always easy.

“People think it’s fortunate to have two languages. People see it as a bonus,” he said. “Of course that’s true to some extent, but it really can be a nightmare.”

Tomin’s explanation of the challenges he’s faced as a translator prove that he has, in fact, lost sleep over the process of rendering a particular phrase in a second language with completely different grammatical structures.

This year, Tomin had the responsibility of naming the Tina B. exhibition known as “Emerging Wor(l)ds,” or “Vznikající (s)věty.” Tomin explained how he first created the English title but could think of no Czech equivalent that would keep the wordplay of the original phrase. After giving up, he woke one night thinking of the Czech phrase, which contains a slight shift in meaning, but captures both the essence and the punning of the English.

“It came to me in a dream,” he said.

“Emerging Wor(l)ds” consists of 60 billboards that Tina B. rented for artists. The result is a collection of mostly text-based works that confront passers-by with messages such as the art group Pode Bal’s statement: “We apologize for our behavior under Nazism” with the logos of Mercedes, Siemens and Volkswagen printed below the script.

As usual, both Tomin’s biography and his opinions played into his explanation of this particular exhibit’s significance.

“Since 1989 in Prague, there’s been an extreme inundation of commercial billboards, which I’ve been able to witness,” he said. “The degree of materialism achieved by this little country is unprecedented. The Tina B. billboards weren’t meant to attack the principle of the billboard, but to contaminate the billboard environment a bit and get people to think about what’s going on.”

Outlaw art

Thus far, the response to “Emerging Wor(l)ds” and the festival has been generally positive. But another exhibit Tomin recently curated met with a less enthusiastic reaction from one prominent member of the local artistic community.

Tomin is currently under criminal investigation for a January exhibition held in Galleria Vernon, where he works as curator. Guma Guar, a politically active Czech artist collective, presented an exhibition named after Milan Knížák, the director of the National Gallery. The group presented artwork under the name “The Milan Knížák Group,” and presented a factual C.V. of Knížák with less-than-flattering details. The repercussions were slow in coming, but severe.

“Five months after the show, I got a call for an interview by the criminal police,” Tomin said. “Knížák’s lawyers had pressed criminal charges against me and the gallery, saying that we were trying to profit on his trademark.”

Tomin maintains that he has no personal conflict with Knížák, but cites the conflict of interest inherent in being a working artist and the director of the National Gallery.

“You can’t be in a position of power in a scene where you are one of the competing entities,” he said.

Tomin is still awaiting word from the police regarding the reasonable grounds behind the charges. In the meantime, he will continue work as curator, translator, interpreter and journalist, while hoping to complete a documentary film he’s been working on since 2001 but has been too busy to finish. Though he feels fortunate to have so many creative and professional outlets, Tomin says he is constantly struggling to stay focused, not to spread himself too thin.

“There isn’t a grounding force for me,” he said. “I’m all these things. It’s difficult to manage, and finding a way to deal with that is a big dilemma in my life.”

Stephan Delbos can be reached at sdelbos@praguepost.com

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