ROTWAND  Sabina Kohler & Bettina Meier-Bickel

Artists :: Anetta Mona Chisa & Lucia Tkacova

Anetta Mona Chisa & Lucia Tkacova

Anetta Mona Chisa & Lucia Tkacova
Prophecy of Things, 2016
Wool
Unique
148 x 87 cm ( 58 1/4 x 34 1/4 inch )

EXHIBITIONS AT ROTWAND

Anetta Mona Chisa & Lucia Tkacova, 2012
Anetta Mona Chisa & Lucia Tkacova, 2016

 

Biography
Documentation

 

Born in 1975 in Romania / 1977 in Slovakia
Live and work in Prague and Berlin.

In 2000 Anetta Mona Chisa and Lucia Tkacova establish their collaborative practice, deciding to do “a piece on the road together.” Over the course of the twelve years that followed they are to remain a party of two, in which they do not engage with each other as a couple but as a pair. A year after they met they produced a video piece indicatively entitled Les amies (Girlfriends, 2000), which does not, however, explicitly deal with their own friendship. Instead it offers a feminist look at a liaison between a girlish-looking woman and a doll, a huge Barbie, which suggests the woman as both consumer and consumed (as an image). It also comically counters the notion of femininity as based on the familiar fiction of “diamonds are a girl’s best friend” while drawing on the revamped image of the 1990s “IT-girl.” And even though this piece is technically raw in comparison their later, more “polished” artworks, it touches on many issues that recur in their art later on: a critique of commodity and the entire spectrum of neoliberal capitalism, the way women are forced into stereotypes, and the role of the authoritative gaze in the consumption of art. Soon they begin to address the mechanisms of the art system to which they belong, asking unpleasant questions about its working processes and impact, as in they did in Romanian pavilion at the Venice Biennial of 2011. What has defined and solidified their friendship—in life and in art—is their sense of humor and their unmatched capacity for self-irony. Indeed, in their work laughter functions as critical mechanism, not merely as a source of enjoyment.

Text excerpt: Bojana Pejic´