Opening: Thursday 21 November 6.30– 8pm
Artist talk: 5.30–6.30 pm on 21 November in the Cube
Informed by historical and political aspects of feminism, Anna Daučíková’s practice addresses issues around normativity and norms, technologies of power, queer subjectivities, and the politics of privacy and intimacies. She has worked in a broad spectrum of media from glass, painting, and drawing, to photography, conceptual photo-collage, performance, and video. Her first solo exhibition in Ireland will feature a selection of recent and older video and photographic works.
Daučíková moved to Moscow in the 1980s and lived through the final decade of the USSR: first, the post-Breznyev era; followed by the Perestroika period, with its complex set of reforms initiated by then General Secretary Mikhail Gorbachev, the devastating Soviet-Afghan War (1979-1989) and one of the longest lasting nuclear catastrophes, Chernobyl (April 1986).
For Daučíková-the-artist, the latter was the period when she discovered the power of photography. Towards the end of the 1980s, she came in contact with feminist thinking and practices through the Italian Diotima group, a community of women philosophers deeply involved in feminist politics since the 1960s. Her involvement with this group informed her LGBT activism, and had a decisive influence on her practice once she moved back to Bratislava in 1991. Daučíková’s Soviet life and professional experiences, as well as her knowledge of the Russian language and culture, remained dormant until the mid-2000s. This exhibition at Project Arts Centre partly interrogates a silent decade, investigating the ways in which these experiences and knowledges were revisited, recovered, and reflected upon in video works such as Thirty-three Situations (2007–2015), Along the Axis of Affinity (2015), and On Allomorphing (2017) commissioned by documenta 14.
Daučíková describes Thirty-three Situations as ‘something between a police dossier, a medical history, and a sort of stigmatic script of the individual situations’ which draws extensively from her life in Moscow where she lived in a ‘kommunalka’ (an apartment shared between several families). Based on anecdotes, the film is made in 4:3 TV format, and builds a fictitious bureaucratic database of the lives of ordinary citizens. Banal, violent, and absurd, the 33 stories present us with glimpses into otherness and tactics of survival within a totalitarian system.
Along the Axis of Affinity centres around the legacy and philosophy of Kiev-based tile-maker, Valery Pavlovich Lamakh (1925–1978), who was a key figure in the ‘unofficial’ network of underground artists. The work meditates on the ways Lamakh’s lifelong research on geometrical schemes were ‘smuggled’ into his state-commissioned mosaic panels for Soviet residential buildings, intercutting them with examples from European post-war building projects. The three-channel video, On Allomorphing, connects narratives that relate to Daučíková’s (self-)education in feminist critique and gender politics, and the continuous transgression of rules, borders, and normativities that shaped her bodily-being-in-becoming transgender and transexual.
Both as a foreigner and an undercover lesbian/transgender person, Daučíková observed different sides of the Soviet everyday life during the demise of the Soviet Union. Her Moscow / Women / Sunday (1989–1990) is a series of snapshots that depict women at their Sunday shopping in a landscape almost devoid of male presence. The sense of fatigue the cycle conveys quietly testifies to a mechanism of survival and female ‘double-employment’.
The exhibition also presents an ongoing series of self-portraits (Untitled1988; Untitled1998; Untitled2017), and After the Turn (2019) a visual commentary on and the photographic reworking (in collaboration with Jiŕí Thýn) of the collage series, The Turn in the Bathtub (1996), a work that signals the shift in her practice to a playful focus on ideas of corporeality, sexuality and perceptions.
Additional events:
Relatively Speaking tour:
1pm on 28 November starting at Project Arts Centre.
Screenings:
6 - 9 pm 28 November 2019
Screening of The Asthenic Syndrome (USSR, 1989) directed by Kira Muratova.
6 – 7.30pm 10 December 2019
Screening curated and introduced by David Crowley, Head of the School of Visual Culture at the National College of Art and Design (NCAD), Dublin.
6 – 7.30pm 16 January 2020
Screening curated and introduced by Nat Schastneva, independent researcher and trans artivist.
All events will be held in the Cube at Project Arts Centre.
