Ernest Daetwyler »CAFKA – an artist run forum in the public realm«
The Contemporary Art Forum Kitchener and Area / CAFKA is an artist-run organization of contemporary artists, writers and curators who continue to establish the forum as one of the largest international visual arts festivals in Canada. For the past five years, the Forum has presented every year a thematically based exhibition of more than twenty innovative public art projects by contemporary visual and media artists in and around City Hall in downtown Kitchener, Ontario. These projects and interventions, many of them interactive, were accompanied by video compilations, on-going performances, panel discussions with artists and curators, artist talks and tours. CAFKA takes contemporary art out of the ‘white cube’ environment of galleries and into the public realm, where people engage with both the work and the national and international artists. The participating artists are present during the forum, give talks, answer to questions of the public and become temporarily a part of our community. www.cafka.org
Ernest Daetwyler is an interdisciplinary artist and a founding member/director of CAFKA, the Contemporary Art Forum Kitchener and Area. He studied at the Schule fuer Gestaltung, Bern, the Centro Europeo in Venice, Italy and received his master diploma from the Schule fuer Gestaltung, St. Gallen Switzerland. His work is being shown in Canada, Europe and internationally. He is the recipient of numerous awards, including the Ontario Arts Council, Presence Suisse, The City of Stratford, The City of Kitchener and the Pollock-Krasner Foundation, New York, N.Y.
Recent international exhibitions took place at Laboratory, the 3. Forest Art Path in Darmstadt, Germany, the Yugoslaw Biennial, Serbia, the 8th Havana Biennial, Cuba, ArtCanal during the expo.02, Switzerland, and in Canada at the Durham Art Gallery, the WKP Kennedy Public Art Gallery, North Bay, the Art Gallery of Mississauga, Cambridge Galleries, the Millennium Park beside Gallery Stratford, the University of Waterloo Art Gallery, the Kitchener-Waterloo Art Gallery, Ed Video Media Arts Centre, Guelph and Peak Gallery, Toronto.
