Manifesto of Futurist Woman (Let’s Conclude), 2008, 11’13’’
Neuer Berliner Kunstverein Video Forum, Alemania. www.nbk.org
The starting point for Chisa / Tkácovás's video is the concluding part of the Manifesto of Futurist Woman written 1912 by the French Futurist Valentine de Saint-Point, in which women are called upon to return to their instincts and exert their power over men. Chisa / Tkácová are staging and documenting a group of majorettes performing this concluding part in semaphore, the naval sign system. The artists are playing with multiple references and translations. Thus, the text of a writer who advocated the feminine rather than feminist culture is transmitted through a language that is only recognizable by a limited category of people and circumscribed to a slowly dying tradition, but which also belongs to one of the long-established male occupations in the same way that majorettes are seen as fulfilling the decorative role ascribed to women in conservative societies. Accentuating one's otherness, as the artists say, becomes in this case a deconstruction of alterity, in its different perceptions, and also a game of translation.
Anetta Mona Chişa (Romania, 1975) and Lucia Tkáčová (Slovakia, 1977) collaborate since 2000. They both graduated at the Academy of Fine Arts and Design of Bratislava and they currently live and work in Prague.
Through works of video, installation, performance and based on texts, the artists reflect on current issues, such as power systems and sexual hierarchies rooted in the world of art and socio-political realities. Raise questions on the subject of manipulation of consciences through the process of diffusion of knowledge, responsible for altering reality and its replacement by artificial constructions. Tkáčová and Chisa interpret art as a science of alchemy with the power to transform the social reality of the world.
www.chitka.info