Anna Daučíková: 24 Kisses (Flight To Let Z)

Granary, Performance with Table, Glass and Video
Limbo II, 1999
Plasy Monastery

Anna Daučíková (1950) is a Slovak visual artist living and working in Bratislava and Prague. After graduating from the Glass in Architecture Studio at the Academy of Fine Arts in Bratislava (1978), she decided for personal reasons to go to Moscow, where she stayed for more than a decade, working with glass, structural numeric painting and later with conceptual photographic and collage work. Her stay there significantly influenced not only the choice of her later themes, but also her civic-activist, socially sensitive and largely conceptual approach to formulating inner attitudes toward personal, artistic and non-artistic subjects.

In the 90s, Daučíková co-founded, and collaborated on the first Slovak feminist magazine Aspekt, which greatly contributed to the expansion of the awareness and discourse about feminist and gender cultural contextsm, publishing translations of major foreign studies. As one of the first Slovak artists who openly engaged in feminism and proclaimed her own homosexual orientation, she now avows herself as a non-identitarian, current in queer theory and practice. For decades, Daučíková has been developing her own often witty and ironic style, through which she questions conventional ideas of gender, social and political identity and, moreover, examines the social aspects of the corporeality, sexuality, trans-sexuality, eroticism and obscenity.

Daučíková’s work, however, does not lack in existential depth. In her oeuvre she clearly demonstrates inherently anchored politics. She is convinced that art is by its nature political; however, she lets topics and testimonies pass through the test of personal experience. Since the mid-90s she has continuously worked in video, where she has served as a critical thorn against the prudish church morality of a de-sexualised and controlled body, and especially against the homophobic attacks culminating in Slovakia in recent years. All her work is characterised by a close, analytical and critical view toward the society she lives in, but which she never judges superficially. On the contrary, she is interested in the everyday, almost banal aspects of social fissures, looking for ways to evoke and mediate them for viewers so they can take their own perspective on it, from their own personal reflection.

From 1999 to 2011, Daučíková was professor at the Academy of Fine Arts and Design in Bratislava, and until 2018, she served as head of the studio of New Media II at the Academy of Fine Art in Prague.