Old Matters
Anna Daučíková (b. 1950) addresses various gender issues and questions involved in the search for one’s identity.Her work includes video art, performance art, and feminist art. The exhibited black-and-white sets of photographs from the Moscow/Soviet era are unfamiliar to the Slovak art scene because most of them were never exhibited there. To some extent, they help to define her later work realized primarily through video art. These photographs show us that social and political attitudes are more apparent in her work than feminist attitudes, that they are a more fundamental feature of her work.
- The largest part of the exhibition is the one I'm standing in front of.00:00:11.824
- 00:00:11.824
- It's a series entitled Upbringing by Touch.00:00:18.172
- 00:00:18.172
- I made it in the mid-90s.00:00:21.476
- 00:00:21.476
- Back then, I was dealing with sexual identity.00:00:24.043
- 00:00:24.043
- It was a huge topic, in the 90s,00:00:30.558
- 00:00:30.558
- and I also expressed my opinion.00:00:35.480
- 00:00:35.480
- I'd say my re-education was quite succesful.00:00:38.429
- 00:00:38.429
- Another part are these women I photographed in Moscow.00:00:43.696
- 00:00:43.696
- The series is called Moscow/ Sunday/ Women.00:00:50.189
- 00:00:50.189
- I photographed them on Sundays,00:00:54.329
- 00:00:54.329
- as men are hardly seen on the streets of Moscow on Sundays.00:00:56.601
- 00:00:56.601
- They sleep off their Saturday night fever or the past hard week.00:01:00.577
- 00:01:00.577
- In the 1980s, only women were seen on the streets on Sundays.00:01:07.047
- 00:01:07.047
- Most of them carried shopping bags.00:01:12.677
- 00:01:12.677
- But they carried them at all times. Also on Mondays and Tuesdays.00:01:15.364
- 00:01:15.364
- Just in case they'd find something in a shop worth buying.00:01:17.944
- 00:01:17.944
- They were ready.00:01:23.526
- 00:01:23.526
- I took pictures of these women, I tried to picture them alone,00:01:26.459
- 00:01:26.459
- to obtain a sort of portrait.00:01:31.336
- 00:01:31.336
- I made the series because I felt like00:01:34.367
- 00:01:34.367
- this part of Soviet history was about to finish.00:01:38.898
- 00:01:38.898
- That was in 1989-90.00:01:43.619
- 00:01:43.619
- Yeltsin was in crisis.00:01:47.156
- 00:01:47.156
- Perestroika had already been discredited for a long time.00:01:51.039
- 00:01:51.039
- This was a post-Soviet moment,00:01:55.025
- 00:01:55.025
- it was obvious these were disappearing objects,00:01:57.705
- 00:01:57.705
- and that these things were going to change quickly.00:02:00.861
- 00:02:00.861
- So I tried to capture them.00:02:03.752
- 00:02:03.752
- I also show other works which are part of my Moscow period.00:02:05.402
- 00:02:05.402
- I took pictures of water glasses, the well-known "granyonyi stakan".00:02:10.398
- 00:02:10.398
- It's a kind of glass known throughout the Soviet Union,00:02:20.144
- 00:02:20.144
- used to drink water but also vodka. It's a 200 ml glass.00:02:25.035
- 00:02:25.035
- It reminds me of our mustard glass.00:02:29.892
- 00:02:29.892
- I made compositions of these glasses representing family configurations.00:02:32.775
- 00:02:32.775
- I found out there were 2 kinds of these glasses:00:02:39.590
- 00:02:39.590
- one was more feminine, the other masculine.00:02:43.984
- 00:02:43.984
- The masculine one was a bit taller. The feminine shorter.00:02:46.913
- 00:02:46.913
- This is how I understood the gender difference.00:02:51.297
- 00:02:51.297
- I dealt with it through still lifes.00:02:56.377
- 00:02:56.377
- I kept on working with the glasses.00:03:00.648
- 00:03:00.648
- As Moscow had a shortage of cafés, people drank in parks.00:03:03.244
- 00:03:03.244
- They would hang their glasses on branches for tomorrow's drink.00:03:11.395
- 00:03:11.395
- When I'd find such a still life, I'd add more glasses.00:03:19.561
- 00:03:19.561
- I offered the people an opportunity to drink from a better glass.00:03:25.747
- 00:03:25.747
- This untitled work is a photo performance.00:03:56.413
- 00:03:56.413
- I am the performer and my feet are my main means of expression.00:04:00.594
- 00:04:00.594
- These are my feet.00:04:05.241
- 00:04:05.241
- When I was working on this series, I realised that in my work,00:04:07.042
- 00:04:07.042
- I touch on the issue of obscenity.00:04:18.259
- 00:04:18.259
- Suddenly, I became conscious of it. It was important for me,00:04:21.889
- 00:04:21.889
- because I started thinking about it in a conceptual way.00:04:29.504
- 00:04:29.504
- Since then, I find I address this issue frequently in my work.00:04:33.724
- 00:04:33.724
- Obscenity as something that occurs off-stage.00:04:40.130
- 00:04:40.130
- Something that is not in the scene, that doesn't belong to it.00:04:45.295
- 00:04:45.295
- I have always been interested in what doesn't belong00:04:49.081
- 00:04:49.081
- and what does.00:04:52.761