Anna Daučiková and Ana Hoffner

The Perpetual Constructing of Oneself

9 August 2021 / 7–8 pm CEST

Ana Hoffner ex-Prvulovic* in conversation with Anna Daučíková on the formation of desires, strategies and forms, beyond the normative. In English language, documentation via YouTube: https://youtu.be/OeHWmM6EoR0

Anna Daučíková's artistic practice encompasses a range of media, from painting and drawing to photography, performance, installation and moving image. Alongside her artistic work she is also a co-founder and activist in several women and queer NGOs and at the end of the '90s she became a spokesperson for LGBT rights in Slovakia. Starting originally as a glass designer, Daučíková spent more than a decade living in Moscow (then USSR) in the 1980s, a period that significantly affected her artistic work. During the 1990s she joined feminist magazine Aspekt in Bratislava, and in co-operation with other female artists (Christina Della Giustina, Eva Filová) she explored feminist approaches in the medium of performance at a number of festivals. During recent decades, video-making became predominant, together with her long-term teaching experience at several art academies. After exploring potentials of queering desire and non-normative sexuality, her focus turned towards video essay, including social themes such as poverty, post-Soviet trauma and memory. Last year's video works convey queer statements involving the artist's own body and bodily action accompanied by voiceover narrative.

Ana Hoffner ex-Prvulovic* is an artist, researcher and writer. She* works within and about contemporary art, art history, cultural studies and critical theory. She is interested in queerness, displays of global capital, coloniality and the East, forms of escape, early psychoanalysis, as well as politics of memory and war. Hoffner works with video, photography, installation and performance. She* employs means of appropriation such as restaging photographs, interviews and reports, and searches for ways to desynchronize normative belongings of body and voice, sound and image. She* works explicitly against the current domination of corporate aesthetics, images of disgust and horror and the right-wing establishment, by insisting on analysis, contextualization and reflection. Hoffner seeks to introduce temporalities, relations and spaces in between iconic images and highly performative events of our totalizing contemporaneity. Her book The Queerness of Memory was published by b_books Berlin in 2018. She* has been Professor for Artistic Research at the Mozarteum University, Salzburg since 2020.

* on the crossroads of those who were born in 1980 in Paraćin (Yugoslavia), who were moved in 1989 and received capitalist citizenship (Austria) with a new name in 2002.