Mobile Tea House


Installation, Performance
Public Space Tel Aviv, ISR, 2021

As part of Loving Art Making Art Festival (LAMA)


Funded by
The Austrian Federal Chancellery


Nomadically, Rainer Prohaska sets out on his way to hold conversations, celebrate tea ceremonies, get in touch with people from his immediate surroundings and let them participate in an unsteady experiment. Not romantic thoughts of retreat, a contemplative turning away from the hectic life are his mainsprings, but a reflected confrontation with contemporary problems, which are current due to the rapid speed of life and information and topics such as ecology, climate change, political upheaval, migration and senseless attempts of isolation.

Instead of an apolitical retreat, Prohaska pushes communication and debate to address, initiate and question new solution models of multiple cultural and social coexistence.

In the Near and Far East, tea rooms function as centers of social interaction. Countries such as Turkey, Iran, Pakistan, Syria, and Lebanon know tea drinking as a mode of communication as a matter of course. Japan and China even build their own buildings for tea consumption - a source of inspiration for Rainer Prohaska. In this combination of architecture and performance, Prohaska builds a bridge between cultural opposites.

In the context of the "Loving Art Making Art" Festival n Tel Aviv, the artist goes one decisive step further in the direction of "Art & Ecological Strategies". Despite an invitation from the curators of the LAMA Festival, Prohaska insists on the "REMOTE METHOD" he has developed. This method prohibits him from both transporting materials from Austria to Israel and traveling as an artist to personally build the teahouse in Tel Aviv. Instead, all materials are organized locally and the construction is handled online in multiple feedback loops and coaching formats. This "REMOTE METHOD" expands both the conceptual and aesthetic horizons of the executing artists in Tel Aviv.