Barbora Klímová (* 1977) completed her studies at the Faculty of Fine Arts at the Brno University of Technology in 2004 and spent the following two years at the Hoger Instituut voor Schone Kunsten in Antwerp. In 2010-2014 she pursued her doctoral studies at the Academy of Fine Arts in Bratislava. Since 2011, she has been the head of the Environmental Studio at FFA BUT in Brno.

Her work straddles several disciplines, from her own artistic work to art history and curating. By moving at the boundaries, she disrupts our established notions of art and research and moves towards what we call artistic research. She has a long-term focus on themes related to the possibilities of mediating live art, and explores the artistic communities that established themselves around selected artists in Moravia in the 1970s and 1980s, with particular attention to artistic figures moving on the margins of the official art scene.

In 2006 she won the Jindřich Chalupecký Award for the project Replaced - Brno 2006. Barbora Klímová repeated five artistic performances from the 1970s and 1980s. The main criterion for the selection was that these performances took place (or could have taken place) in public spaces. Another important aspect was that these were not clearly identifiable performances, but rather actions that resembled normal behaviour.

Another particularly interesting project of hers is Famous Brno Villas II (2007). Barbora Klímová created a parallel project to the exhibition at the Brno House of Arts called Famous Brno Villas. The exhibition featured the book of the same name from the edition Famous Villas published by the Foibos publishing house and was dedicated to outstanding family houses from Brno, especially from the interwar period. In her alternative project, Klímová gave priority to communist era buildings from the second third of the twentieth century. In 2011, her book We Lived through that Project. Building a House in the Normalization Period was published by the Zlatý řez publishing house.

Her interest in the alternative art scene and conceptual art, which began with the Replaced-Brno 2006 project, has developed into a long-term collaboration and targeted research of the art scene in Moravia. The result was a series of exhibitions and events, culminating in the publication entitled Together. Artists and Communities in Moravia in the 1970s-1980s. The book was published in 2013 in a co-edition of tranzit.cz and the Faculty of Fine Arts of the Brno University of Technology. The publication examines artistic manifestations on the border of social events in the Moravian environment of the given period and each of the five chapters is dedicated to one or two artists. In 2021, she followed up this work with the publication The Living Generation, in which she focuses more on female authors.

In 2019, Barbora Klímová became the winner of the thirteenth annual prize for artists over thirty-five years of age called The Artist Has a Prize.

I started to perceive the medium of artistic research around 2004 during my postgraduate studies in the Netherlands. That was when the production of artefacts, interventions that I had been involved in during and just after my studies became a bit empty for me. For various reasons I stopped trusting the art world. I wanted to work with architects or urban planners, for example. And the medium of artistic research was liberating for me. It made me believe again in the potential of art. Although I'm not sure I understood it properly at that time. And actually I don't know even now, because I'm not theoretically involved in it. But at some point, some vague awareness that artistic research was possible merged with tendencies and practices that made sense to me in my work. I began to mix action, performative and participatory approaches with documentary, a reflection on recent cultural history. In the last ten years, the medium of artistic research has become more and more common in the Czech Republic, especially in connection with doctoral studies at art schools, and now I am more reserved about using the term. I have also, of course, registered criticisms of artistic research. My favourite Jan Van Eyck Academy used to refer to participants in the 2000s as "researchers", and now I think they've gone back to "participants".

Maybe in that I am less and less concerned with whether what I do is considered art or anything else. I would also like to say that art research seems to have appeared in art around the turn of the 21th century, but if you look at Slovak conceptualism of the 1960s, for example, Julius Koller, Peter Bartoš, or Róbert Cyprich, they are very close to what we talk about today as art research, only it wasn't called that then. I think that the tendency of art to penetrate into the non-art or even scientific fields has been present at least since the 1960s, certainly even earlier.

[pause] 

Now, I don't actually know if I've ever been in a situation where I was describing it to students. But, on second thought, yes. In art, one can borrow tools and techniques from other, non-art fields. For example, he can use methods from various scientific and non-scientific fields based on a subjectively formulated interest, and he can use them freely, without the constraints that are traditionally associated with that particular discipline. He can mix those approaches, collaborate with experts. He can afford to be a layman. The output does not have to be the traditional format associated with fine art. I see especially in the medium of artistic research the potential to reach unexpected outcomes, knowledge that is not possible in strictly defined expert disciplines.

It's probably more artistic. I'm a very intuitive person, even though it may not look like it based on my work, I don't make decisions very rationally. I just have a need to do something and roughly a plan, and what comes out of it is a matter of time, process, or circumstances.

That's how I see the books I've published. [Replaced-Brno 2006, We Lived Through the Project; Building a Family House in the Normalization Period, from 2011, Together. Artists and Communities in Moravia in the 1970s-1980s, from 2013; or The Living Generation, from 2021.] They are a record of artistic research or some longer-term process. I usually work on things for years. They evolve gradually as part of partial outcomes. By publishing, the related projects have somehow come to a close for me, or at least their particular phase. I probably use the word project more often than the phrase artistic research. It's something that's open-ended and contrasts with the way we talk about a project in architecture, where it's a plan of work. It's not like that in art, it's much more process-oriented. It can be open ended and it can go outside the domain of art or traditional studio work.

I think that the project Famous Brno Villas II was motivated by a lack of reflection on cultural history in Czechia. And that resonated then, too. I don't want to say that I caused the Foibos agency to include villas from the 70s and 80s in exhibitions and publications, but somehow it worked in that environment and I'm proud of that. But if I try to imagine that I want to approach everything with the ambition to change something, that it should be somehow revolutionary, then it could be a hindrance.