Anetta Mona Chiça, Lucia Tkáčová: Totems
Intervention in Pálffy Palace
The installation Totems comprises a series of five unique sculptures made
of burnt books on concrete bases. Individual book titles are not recognisable, however, as in the process of burning they merged into a complete
sculptural work that reflect wellknown geometric forms, for example
Brancusi’s pedestal sculptures, and in terms of content is connected
with social utopias in the tradition of artistic avant-gardes of futurism
or constructivism. Authors who systematically analyse regimes of patriarchally
constructed female representation work with books as symbols of literacy,
a purportedly masculine and unquestionable sign of progress. From the
books, which form majestic objects in a new vertical arrangement and
suggest the fragility of burning, they created irrational, difficult to verbalise,
totemic figures of the language of the sculptural work.