Artist talk: Robo Švarc – Joseph Beuys between democracy and oak trees
Rob Švarc's artist talk before the performance In the Glow of Lightning will offer insight into the thinking, work, and teaching of one of the most influential artists of the 20th century. The meeting will be moderated by Robo Švarc, who has captured his long-standing interest in Beuys' work in the publication Non Exit: Joseph Beuys' Social Sculpture and Egon Bondy's Insubstantial Ontology. He will shed light on the context of the work Democracy is Fun and the principles of Beuys' reformist pedagogical concept based on the assertion that everyone is an artist. He will explain the idea of social sculpture in the context of the planting of 7,000 oak trees at Documenta 7 in Kassel in 1982. The program loosely follows on from the production In the Glow of Lightning and is an opportunity to delve deeper into its themes.
Robo Švarc (*1983, Bratislava) is a visual artist, curator, author, chef, and translator from German. He studied painting at the Kunstakademie Düsseldorf (2008-2014). From 2009 to 2017, he worked as an artistic assistant in the Kochkunst workshop of German-Hungarian artist and chef Arpad Dobriban. Since 2013, he has been running the Lecture Art project, which combines cultural, gastronomic, and environmental themes in the form of lectures, seminars, workshops, gastro-events, festivals, etc. In 2021, he curated the year-long multidisciplinary festival Beuys Will Be Beuys for the Goethe Institute in Bratislava. In 2021, he published the book Non Exit and a translation of the book Kongo Tribunál by Milo Rau. He is currently finalizing the translation of the book Gesellschaftsspiele. Politisches Theater heute by Florian Malzacher, which will be published in early 2026 by the Theater Institute in Bratislava. In the 2024/25 academic year, 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 (Hopelessness and Despair), which has been involved in utopian-realistic projects in the field of ecology and art since 2023. In 2025, he began doctoral studies at UMPRUM in Prague.