Since its first edition in 2009, the New festival has been a platform for expression and production, a laboratory of new forms of creation. The relationship between art and the game, which were closely tied at the end of the 19th century and active throughout the 20th, is alive and fruitful, now more than ever. It’s a fact and what better time to explore it than at the New festival?

New for this year is the Ping-Pong Club opened by Július Koller in Bratislava in 1970, and reactivated in at the Centre Pompidou with Rirkrit Tiravanija. In 1970 Július Koller (1939-2007) transformed the exhibit space into a tennis club. After the Prague Spring, in a country where  censorship and repression prevailed, the playing field was a place defined by the rules of conduct in the image of a democracy. The Ping-Pong Club embodies a non-hierarchical and non-violent form of social functioning. With the help of Rirkrit Tiravanija this device is reactivated for New festival. Playing freely, visitors gamble while measuring the democratic dimension of a practice with known and accepted rules.