Anna Daučíková

Anna Daučíková (born in Bratislava in 1950) is a painter, photographer, performance and video artist. In 2017 she participated in documenta 14. From 1999 to 2011 she was a professor at the Academy of Fine Arts and Design, Bratislava and currently teaches at the Academy of Fine Arts, Prague. In the 1980s, after graduating from the Academy of Fine Arts in Bratislava, she moved to Moscow, working on automatic abstract paintings questioning the notion of authorship. She lived in the Soviet Union for 12 years during the period of perestroika. She did not exhibit her artwork publicly during this time. During this period she produced black-and-white photo series documenting certain aspects of late Soviet era daily life, for example Moscow/Women/Sunday (1989 – 1990), which documented Moscow women on the street. During this time she also produced photo series of drinking glasses on window-ledges, including Family Album (1990), first exhibited in 2017, in which the various compositions represent standard and nonstandard family structures. On her return to Bratislava in 1991 she co-founded the Slovakian feminist cultural journal Aspekt. Throughout the 1990s, she experimented with the representation of sexuality depicted in the medium of video, often combining video screenings with live performances. She has exhibited in a number of major international exhibitions, including Gender Check (2009–2010) at Mumok Vienna and Zachęta National Gallery of Art in Warsaw, and documenta 14 (2017) in Athens and Kassel. In 2018, she was the winner of the Schering Stiftung Art Award and had a solo exhibition at the KW Institute for Contemporary Art Berlin.


Talking to You

2021,
Two-channel video installation

Talking to You, produced for the 2021 Jakarta Biennale, shows a performance of the two artists Anchan (played by Daučíková) and Tamarra, who lives in Jakarta. Recorded on September 24, 2021, the online conference contains verbal and non-verbal dialog fragments that reveal the everyday precariousness and resilience of non-binary people’s lives. It touches on issues that go far beyond the personal, such as the pervasive presence of all sorts of fears across the planet. At the same time, the performance seeks to open up ideas and possibilities of simple physical communication. In this way, the two artists exchange ideas by means of gestures about concepts of the «in-between» that relate to normed binary gender identities, while in their verbal articulation they predominantly address aspects related to qualities and action. A rich vocabulary of communicative reciprocities is thus gradually formed, committed to a tentative or sensitive search for a you. «I found fulfillment in discovering forms derived from gestures and sounds, from euphonious words ... and saw that all this together creates the «I».» (Anna Daučíková)

exhibition
vienna

Augarten Contemporary, hoast, IG Architektur, Laurenz, Neuer Kunstverein Wien, Never At Home, Waffen Franz Kapfer, New Jörg, Ve.Sch
October 17–December 17

Main Exhibition

Curators: Serge Klymko, Hedwig Saxenhuber and Georg Schöllhammer