Milan Cais

Milan Cais (b. 1974) is a Czech visual artist, performer, musician, co-founder and key member of the band Tata Bojs, who has been alternating between music and visual art since 1988. He is a graduate of the Academy of Fine Arts in Prague (1999 – sculpture studio under Prof. Hugo Demartini and Prof. Jindřich Zeithammel, visual communication studio under Jiří David).

He works in the fields of sculpture, painting, drawing, scenography, performance, and video. As his diploma project, he created a three-dimensional self-portrait, a talking robot named p3D–01. He is the creator of the Night Watchman project, which has been installed in various forms in different locations over the years: on the roof of the Goethe-Institut in Prague (2000), on the bridge towers of the Charles Bridge in Prague (2013), on the cooling towers of the Temelín nuclear power plant near České Budějovice (2018), and on the building of the National Museum in Prague (2019). For the permanent exhibition of the Czech Museum of Music in Prague, he created the audiovisual installation 4 Elements in 2004. In 2005, he participated in the World Expo 2005 in Aichi, Japan, with an object titled "Kapkostroj" (Droplet Machine), which was part of the "Garden of Imagination" project in the Czech pavilion. That same year, he received third place in the Ministry of Culture's "Most Beautiful Czech Book" awards for his illustrations in the book *Nanobook*. Together with Petr Nikl and other artists, he created a series of interactive exhibitions such as *Hnízda her* (Nests of Games), *Orbis Pictus*, *Labyrint světla* (Labyrinth of Light), *Leporelohra*, and *Play*. In 2018, he curated an extensive retrospective exhibition for the thirtieth anniversary of Tata Bojs titled TATA 3OJS at the DOX Centre for Contemporary Art. A lavish book titled *TATALOG* was also published for the occasion.

He has participated in numerous group exhibitions both in the Czech Republic and abroad, and his work is represented in several state and private collections. From 1988 to the present, he has been a member of the group Tata Bojs as a composer, singer, drummer, lyricist, visual artist, and producer. He has recorded eleven studio albums with them, for which the band has received ten Anděl music awards and numerous other accolades. In addition to composing for his home band, Tata Bojs, he also creates music for theater and film. Since 2020, he has been a regular broadcaster on Czech Radio Vltava, where he selects his favorite music and invites interesting guests on his show, *Sedmé nebe* (Seventh Heaven).

Find more about him on his website milancais.cz, or on Instagram.