Who was Joseph Beuys?
An artist talk by Robo Švarc held before the performance V záři blesku offers insight into the thinking, work, and pedagogical practice of one of the most influential artists of the 20th century. Beuys’s ideas will be introduced by Robo Švarc, whose long-term engagement with Beuys’s work is reflected in his publication Non Exit: The Social Sculpture of Joseph Beuys and the Non Substantial Ontology of Egon Bondy. The talk will shed light on the context of the work Democracy Is Fun and on the principles of Beuys’s reform-oriented pedagogical concept based on the assertion that everyone is an artist. The idea of social sculpture will be explained through the circumstances surrounding the planting of 7000 Oaks at documenta 7 in Kassel in 1982. The programme loosely follows the performance In the Glare of Lightning and offers an opportunity to delve more deeply into its themes.
🌟 Robo Švarc 🌟 (born 1983, Bratislava) is a visual artist, curator, author, cook, and translator from German. He studied painting at the Kunstakademie Düsseldorf (2008–2014). Between 2009 and 2017, he worked as an artistic assistant in the Kochkunst studio of the German-Hungarian artist and cook Árpád Dobriban. Since 2013, he has been developing the project Lecture Art, which connects cultural, gastronomic, and environmental strands through lectures, seminars, workshops, gastro-events, festivals, and related formats. In 2021, he curated the year-long multidisciplinary festival Beuys Will Be Beuys for the Goethe-Institut in Bratislava.
In 2021, his book Non Exit was published, along with his translation of Milo Rau’s The Congo Tribunal. He is currently finalising a translation of Florian Malzacher’s book Gesellschaftsspiele. Politisches Theater heute, to be published in early 2026 by the Theatre Institute in Bratislava. In the academic year 2024/25, he led the seminar Art in the Anthropocene at the Academy of Performing Arts in Bratislava. He is a co-founding member of the civic association Beznádej a zúfalstvo, which since 2023 has been focusing on utopian-realist projects in the fields of ecology and art. In 2025, he began his doctoral studies at UMPRUM in Prague.