Anna Daučíková

Biography

Among Anna Daučíková’s Moscow works is a series of photographs in which drinking glasses stand on window-ledges. From their arrangement she built “Family Album” (1990): the different compositions represent standard and nonstandard family structures. The series was first shown only in 2017, almost thirty years after it was made.

She was born on 18 August 1950 in Bratislava. From 1972 to 1978 she studied at the Academy of Fine Arts and Design in Bratislava, in the glass studio of the architecture department, under Václav Cigler. After her studies Daučíková moved to Moscow and lived in the Soviet Union for about twelve years, a stay that took in the perestroika period. She did not exhibit her work there. She earned her living by glassblowing. She painted “automatic” abstract pictures built on repeated numbers and numerical formulas; she linked the meaning of these works to the question of authorship. By one account, in those years she was a member of the Union of Artists of the USSR, the official state-run artists’ organisation, but only her glass and paintings entered official circulation. In parallel she produced black-and-white photo series about everyday life in the late Soviet period. The best known, “Moscow/Women/Sunday” (1989–1990), was shot on the street and shows Moscow women. Only a small part of this large body of work has been shown to the public.

In 1991 she returned to Bratislava and, with others, co-founded the Slovak feminist cultural journal Aspekt. In the 1990s she began to take part in the work of several organisations defending women’s rights and in LGBT activism. She was one of the first Slovak artists to speak openly about her sexual orientation.

Around 1994 Daučíková gave up painting for installations, performance and, finally, video. Her early works include “Acquabelle” (1995, 17 minutes), “Afternoon” (1996), “Kissing Hour” (1997), “Queen’s Finger” (1998), “Siesta” (2000), “We Care About Your Eyes” (2003), “Piano Trio in B Flat” (2004) and “Passing” (2005). She often combined video screenings with live performance. Later came “Portrait of a Woman with Institution – Anča Daučíková with Roman Catholic Church” (2011), “Three Curtains” (2014), “Along the Axis of Affinity” (2015) and “Thirty-three Situations” (2015, about 109 minutes). The subject of her videos is the body, desire and the search for her own identity, often with irony. She can show desire without displaying the body: through sound and touch. For her, video remains the image in motion. To my mind, that definition explains her move from painting to the camera better than any manifesto. She calls herself a “marked artist”.

From 1999 Daučíková taught at the Academy of Fine Arts and Design in Bratislava, where she ran the studio of video and multimedia. By one account she worked there until 2011, by another until 2013, and for several years she was vice-rector. She then joined the Academy of Fine Arts in Prague, where she heads the new media studio.

She lives and works in Prague and Bratislava.

Her work has been shown in the exhibitions “Gender Check” (2009–2010) at Mumok in Vienna and the Zachęta National Gallery of Art in Warsaw, “Ars Homo Erotica” at the National Museum in Warsaw (2010), Manifesta 10 in Saint Petersburg (2014), the Kyiv Biennial (2015) and documenta 14 in Athens and Kassel (2017). In 2016 she received the Jiří Surůvka Prize for artists over 35, and in 2018 the Schering Stiftung Art Award, along with a solo exhibition at the KW Institute for Contemporary Art in Berlin. Her works are held by the Slovak National Gallery in Bratislava.