Mgr. et Mgr. Darina Alster, Ph.D.

Darina Alster is an intermedia artist, performer and techno-wizard. She works with new forms of performance with staged elements, costumes and site specific situational scenography. The themes of the performances range from personal mystical-bodily experiences of temporality and powerful emotions to highly engaged commentaries on globally shared aspects of contemporary world, often silenced or tabooed. She works with the tension between apparent rationality of contemporary technologies and the irrationality of archaic media such as astrology and tarot, myths and fairy tales, and other kinds of religious and secular archetypes. Often she deals with archives of personal and social and institutional memory or the memory of specific place, which she perceives in personal and political contexts. On social themes, she through personal bodily experience, which, when grasped as a generational testimony, takes on social and critical overlaps. The personal thus becomes political. Since 2016, she cares of the Mothers Artlovers collective, and since 2019, together with Kateřina Olivová, she has been the head of the New Media Studio 2 at the Academy of Fine Arts in Prague.