ZKM | Museum of Contemporary Art, 09|17|2011 – 02|05|2012
 
Anetta Mona Chişa & Lucia Tkáčová
Anetta Mona Chişa, * 1975 in Nădlac (RO), lives and works in Prague (CZ)
Lucia Tkáčová, * 1977 in Banská Štiavnica (SK), lives and works in Prague (CZ) and Bratislava (SK)


Artist Statement

In our works, we like to interlink all kinds of practices and so destabilize the historical, scientific, and philosophical pillars of society. Since our world is constituted by words (language = spectacle = nomenclature), in order to bring about a change, we are looking for words/language that are capable of creating transformations, that is, gossip, jokes, mantras, incantations, oral instead of written history, etc. Art is for us an alchemistic process that should have a transformative (magical) effect, a homeopathic process with re-forming consequences for the world. The retreat to the kingdom of magic is also a political decision, an escape into a field beyond any kind of economic, legislative or political surveillance, and beyond any control by the Empire. Usually a female duo is perceived as the incarnation of standard erotic male fantasies. Yet precisely because we are a female duo, we generate the cockiness and strength to wrestle with the sublimations of these fantasies. Forming and performing a female duo is a way to outdare the scripts that are inflicted on women by society, as well as a way of dismantling the self-imposed (internalized) mechanisms of male domination that women themselves perform. We belong to a generation that had to learn to forget and to re-discover a new version of the past. Everything we learned at school suddenly became false, and this shift strongly relativized our trust in the institution of history as a record of “truth.” We are interested in the zombiesque monads from the past that still haunt us today, and in the embryos of the future in the past. Today we are living the return of history. After the triumphalist “end of History” (Francis Fukuyama, The End of History and the Last Man, Free Press, New York, 1992), it is now time to re-imagine the past and to “begin from the beginning” (Lenin).

Excerpts from “From Flirtation through Fatal Attraction to Fixation – Balancing out the Scales of Power”, Raluca Voinea in conversation with Anetta Mona Chişa and Lucia Tkáčová




CurnierJardin_AMI_pretresse_double

Try again. Fail again. Fail better, 2011
Video, Farbe, Ton, 7:57 Min.,
courtesy Anetta Mona Chişa & Lucia Tkáčová