I LOOK AT A SUN, I AM A CATCH, A CAVE ANT

OPENING: FRIDAY, MARCH 4, 2016, 6-8pm

March 5 - April 9, 2016

It’s with great pleasure that we announce our second solo exhibition with the artist duo Anetta Mona Chisa & Lucia Tkacova (*1975 in Romania / *1977 in Slovakia, live and work in Prague and Berlin) at Rotwand.

At the heart of Anetta Mona Chisa and Lucia Tkacova’s collaboration lies the quest to find a means of reconciling the political with the aesthetic validity of art. How can art articulate resistance and stimulate social change without diminishing its aesthetic power or facilitating its instrumentalization? The duo has pursued this question across a range of media, including film, installation, textual work, drawing, performance, photography and sculpture.

Underlying Chisa and Tkacova’s concept for the exhibition I LOOK AT A SUN, I AM A CATCH, A CAVE ANT is the assumption that every form of social resistance articulated through the medium of art has thus far failed to achieve its objective. In a society wrought by constant and dramatic change, this realization necessitates that we turn away from the familiar in search of new approaches that might facilitate the expression of resistance with the instruments of art. The artists roundly reject Ludwig Wittgenstein’s assertion that the limits of one’s language are the limits of one’s world. Instead, they seek to open our minds to a dimension beyond language which transcends the limits of both the known and the effable. The artists also have little faith in the capacity of conventional artistic expression to stimulate social change; this, perhaps, because of its reliance on a form of visibility. Instead, Chisa & Tkacova trust in the power of the invisible, the unspeakable and the unknown. A power that is represented, the artists posit, in a state in which space dissolves and the individual is bereft of all but the Self and its subjectivity.

Exploring the themes of transformation, the loss of the self, and new beginnings the exhibition employs installations, sculptures and intimate objects to negate the central pillars of our neo-liberal way of life – visibility, language, knowledge and economy – while referencing the social utopias elaborated by the avant-garde movements of the twentieth century and by Aldous Huxley in his novel Island. Traversing various expressions of darkness, invisibility and the unspoken, their exhibition I LOOK AT A SUN, I AM A CATCH, A CAVE ANT (an anagram of the artists’ names) at Rotwand will seek to distill the conditions for the liberation of thought from the conscious and the known.

Excerpt from a text by Janneke de Vries, director GAK – Gesellschaft für aktuelle Kunst, Bremen