Listen to the Typewriter and Pound the Dough are part of the series Anti-stress Techniques. The series was the conclusion of the SUR*VIVER project, which explored various aspects of the survival strategies employed by artists.
“Using the media of photography, video and installation, Tina Smrekar suggests various relaxing methods to artists (and all the other stressed-out people, as she says) in her Anti-stress Techniques series, maintaining the characteristic irony apparent already in her earlier works (e.g. the video Always Smile, 2005, or the artist book Work, a Manual, 2005). […]
The Anti-stress Technique series proposes routines for de-stressing available to anybody; read in the context of the SUR*VIVER project, however, these works also underscore the unenviable position of contemporary art and, above all, the undervalued artist as the producer of artworks who is at the same time a person of flesh and blood, thus torn between the need to pay the bills and produce works of art.”
Alenka Gregorič
Tina Smrekar has completed her Photography MA at the Academy of Visual Arts Leipzig after graduating in design at the Academy of Fine Arts and Design in Ljubljana. She works in photography, video, installation as well as occasionally performance. She has received several grants, among them DAAD, KulturKontakt Austria, Bauhaus Dessau. In 2012 she was nominated for the OHO award.