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Les travailleurs n'ont pas de patrie
Mira Keratova


In the background of most of the artworks created by Anetta Mona Chisa and Lucia Tkacova is the potency and intensity of masculine and feminine fantasies and their encounters. The enigma of power division becomes a bone of contention - no matter whether it is the tension around Baudrillardian symbolic sexual power or real power, represented by masculine hierarchical structures. Inversive and subversive principles turn hierarchical standards inside out and upside down: the high is degraded, the low is elevated, the secret becomes expressed, the hidden becomes visible, the intuited becomes proven... Dialogue as a preeminent communication model is built into the intrinsic structure of the artwork, taking the form of female conversational game-playing. It justifies the artists' highly subjective declarations and explains their characteristic reality-show approach to authenticity.
Many of the artists' works take place and originate in the most intimate spaces of the female domain. Here, women's stories are told in the greatest detail, strategies are generated, endpoints are romanticized, and testimonies assessed: in bed, in women's restrooms, in cafes, in swimming pools... The performance Uncomfortable Heritage (2005) is set in the bathroom of a private apartment, while the video Capital: Magical Recipes for Love, Happiness and Health (2006) takes place in the apartment of a fortune-teller. In the latter work the setting, as well as the motivation for visiting the fortune-teller, engages the stereotypical idea that women are seemingly happy with the mere suggestion of answers, hints of visions, and that, without sound arguments, they can start to believe in self-fulfilling prophecies, building fragile emotional constructs about the world around them.
Capital was first presented in the exhibition Ortografio de Potenco (Futura gallery, Prague, 2006). This show took as its theme the myriad forms of power: professional, political, ideological, and geographical. Chisa and Tkacova selected the postcolonial dialectic of West versus East as the leitmotif of their work. They emphasized a curtailed approach to the process of evaluation, which is magnified by a geographically disadvantageous position. The narrative of the video is based on the completely absurd idea of using Karl Marx's Das Kapital as a basis for telling fortunes. Taking the treatise on political economy that Marx developed in relation to the conditions of production in what was then a new capitalist system dominated by nation-states, the artists apply it to the current situation in postcommunist New Europe. The work also evokes the ideologically and historically discredited symbols of the totalitarian "socialistic" machinery of the former Eastern Bloc. Liberal pluralism - which is tolerant toward minority communities, even xenophobic ones that live idly outside the framework of production relations - is introduced and positioned as a potential counter - symbol of the fortune-teller character.

The video incorporates many actual Marxist predictions and can be read through these particular Marxist formulations. (The exchange value of this artwork differs depending on time and place; Das Kapital, as a commodity, has its use value... ) Capital interconnects occultism with clearly defined dialectical materialism. The esoteric tools used in the video to interpret this materialistic mantra are in contradiction to the substance of materialism, and vice versa. This piece, a metaphor for the battle between the past and the future, presents the motif of the helplessness of ideology against the future. It expresses the universal past, which determines the personal future, and mixes the search for a place for the ideology of yesterday with the wish to know one's destiny. Utopian Marxism, based on the presumption of the absolute in its standpoint toward the world, becomes - like religion, which it substituted for in communist times - an ingredient in a homemade recipe for how to explain the absolute. Relations of the political and the personal become a basis for layman-like, kitchen-table politicking.
The story of Capital touches on the topic of the contextual interpretation of Eastern European art and its stereotypical modes of representation, derived from a grid of geopolitical relations. Elements of this specific situation, characterized by confusion about identity and a hysterical refusal of past, can be found in Uncomfortable Heritage as well. This live action, first held at a private party, created a surprising situation: the only available bathroom was occupied by young girls in Slovak folk costumes. The performance launched the projection of the Slovak romantic myth of authenticity, stereotypically represented by the idealized costume-wearing figures, who are often inserted into rural environments. It created a deja-vu of the image of the nation constructed by Slovak modernism, which degenerated during the era of socialist realism but still survives up to the present day through imaginary parables.

The passive presence of the costumed girls in the bathroom violated the privacy of the visitors. This intense experience of discomfort articulates the necessity to take a stance toward cultural traditions, which shape the way people think about themselves. The unsettling intervention into a seemingly safe, intimate environment forced the viewers to confront their own identities. An occupied, stolen private space generated tension, causing visitors to sublimate an unexpected urge to behave in an official way.

The performance materialized something that is usually bypassed with words only or limited to rough declarations—our silent confrontation with ourselves. The users of the lavatory found themselves, for a moment, in a scene from Andrei Tarkovsky's Solaris - haunted by the persecution complex of their own identity.


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