2018 — Differentiation
 
Building on the first get together of the community in 2016, the 2018 Tape Art Convention marked a decisive step in establishing tape art as an independent artistic practice. Expanding to twenty-four artists from a wide range of cultural, geographic, and professional backgrounds, the exhibition foregrounded both the quality and the diversity of artistic approaches within the medium. Architects, designers, visual artists, and sculptors worked alongside practitioners rooted in contemporary art, revealing tape art as a field shaped by heterogeneous influences rather than a single stylistic lineage.
 
A central curatorial aim was to clearly distinguish tape art from worn-out categorisations such as “street art” or “urban art.” While the medium may share a history of working outside traditional formats, the practices presented aligned more closely with art-historical traditions of material experimentation, avant-garde strategies, ready-made thinking, and pop art’s engagement with everyday objects.
 
Tape was not treated as a graphic substitute for paint, but as a spatial, structural, and conceptual material in its own right.
What connected the participating artists was a shared drive to create with radically simple means and to push the limits of an everyday, industrial material. Tape — cheap, reversible, and ubiquitous — became a tool for reinterpretation of the mundane, supporting shifts in perspective.
Workshops played a key role in this edition, reinforcing the idea of tape art as an open source practice — one that lowers technical thresholds while expanding conceptual possibilities.
The 2018 edition wanted to show tape art not as a stylistic label, but as a method of thinking through material, space, and perception — firmly rooted in broader histories of experimental and site-specific art.