Tina Smrekar: Always Smile

Author: Tina Smrekar
Title: Always Smile
Year of Creation: 2005
Owner: Tina Smrekar
Work info: Video, screening version DVD
Duration: 5’40’’

Decription of work:
“A souvenir vendor at Octoberfest. The absurdity of all what we have to do for money combined with the fact that we even have to smile while doing it if we want to earn something in the first place is emphasised with music that provides the air of slapstick comedy.”
On her work: What does an artist do in case s/he cannot provide for living with his/her artistic work? Like so many others, I am also confronted with the dilemma: “To earn or to create” and therefore I am reflecting upon that situation in artistic practice. In the field of “To be or not to be an artist” I use my appearance as a character red thread through various media, various parts of project and, last but not least, as a research topic. I stage the repetitive figure on photographs, video and in the book, the line between different aspects of work becoming increasingly thinner.

Tina Smrekar (1978)
The main fields of her artistic expression are photography, video, installation, research projects and performance.

She lives and works in Ljubljana. In 2005 she concluded her post-graduate studies in Photography at the Academy of Visual Arts in Leipzig. She received her B.A. in Industrial Design at the Academy of Fine Arts in Ljubljana. She was attending specialisation courses at the University of Arts and Design in Helsinki, Finland and at Bauhaus-Kolleg in Dessau, Germany. Her works have been exhibited in numerous galleries including in P74 Gallery in Ljubljana (2006), Artpoint Gallery in Vienna (2006) and the festival Break 2.2 in Ljubljana (2003). Her scholarships include the scholarship of the Ministry of Culture of the Republic of Slovenia, Artist-in-Residence KulturKontakt Austria and DAAD scholarship (Deutscher Akademischer Austauschdienst).