Gibraltar Body Art Association holds annual festival

The Gibraltar Body Art Association held its ninth annual Body Art festival during May 2022.

This year’s theme was ‘80’s Retro Neon’ and nostalgia played quite a role into a lot of the entries.

The entries had between three to 10 hours to produce a final piece, which was then submitted to their respective judging team.

“As many others, we are slowly transitioning back into tradition events we decided to hold the festival in part online and in person,” a spokesman from the Gibraltar Body Art Association said.

“ As per tradition, we presented various categories including body paint and special FX. With having a mixture of online and live event this brought up new challenges for the committee and organisers, such as judging (virtually, electronically etc.)”

“For this reasoning, we could maximise the participants who would still want to take part in some way or form, but who may or may not have still been affected by certain restrictions in their local areas.”

“Another major change going online vs physical which most were worried about was the timing of the individual category days; again rather than being restricted to regional regulations we held the festival throughout the month; in which this time we had participants from around the world; including Gibraltar; UK; Italy; Japan; USA; Mexico, Australia and France, who were able to prepare and submit their various entries without worrying to a fixed date as a 2-3-day festival is typically held.”

This year’s judging panel was diverse, with a team of international guests who have worked in their respective makeup- arts, movie and film industries who gave their time to review each of the entries individually or through zoom.

“There, each entry was scrutinized and analysed under various aspects, brushwork, line work, theme, story behind idea, overall look, etc. With the winners announced a few days after the festival closed and the points collected and tallied,” the spokesman said.

“We at the association would like to thank the Gibraltar ministry of culture for all their help towards the festival; without forgetting all the amazing models, artists, judges and photographers who put in so much of their time and effort who without, this amazing event would not have happened; along with our sponsors.”

Full gallery of participants and categories and be found on the Associations website https://gibraltarbodyart.wixsite.com/festival/gibraltar-festival-2022-main or alternatively in their Facebook group.