Requiem for Mobile Telephones is a series of happenings given by Lubo Kristek in Czechia, Austria, Germany and Poland and also an interactive assemblage created in the process. Kristek started it in 2007 to protest against the addictions to new technologies. He asked the audience to give up their mobile phones and use them to create an assemblage.


The first action was held in the city of Znojmo. The spectators sewed the mobile phones directly on to the artist wearing a jacket with a train (the jacket then became the basis for new assemblage).


The second happening took place in public area – on the pavement of Mariahilfer Straße in Vienna in 2007. Kristek who likes to remove the barriers between art and reality, deliberately got with his action in the way of passers-by to pull them out of their stereotype and to force them adopt an attitude. The artist dipped the balerina’s pointe shoes into the paint and let her dance on a blank canvas. The pointe shoes also became part of the assemblage afterwards. Then he invited school pupils and passers-by to help to create the new assemblage, to paint and sew more mobile phones on to it. Art and life merged in the avant-garde sense.


The assemblage travelled to an exhibition at the Barockschloß Riegersburg, today Schloss Ruegers (2007). The artist continued to travel with his mission to other states. With each happening interaction the assemblage changed its shape.


In 2008, the happening series continued in the Neues Stadtmuseum, Landsberg am Lech. It was part of the retrospective exhibition of the works by Lubo Kristek titled Third Eye of Distant Communication.


The following happening took place in a Polish city of Sucha Beskidzka in 2010. According to Kristek, the relationship of contemporary society to the mobile telephone bears the traits of a cult or even a pathological dependency. Therefore he places this “modern god” on the altar (with the inscription Rest in Peace) and lets a giant triple-breasted angel to drill it through. The participants of the happening actively contribute to the act of sacrificing the mobile phones.


Requiem for Mobile Telephones belongs to Kristek’s critical assemblages as well as Soundproof Aesthetic of Luxuriety (1976) that reveals the traps of consume approach and In the Prematurely Cloned Age of One Planet (2003) that questiones the ethics of current medical science.

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