Image : Anetta Mona Chiça, Lucia Tkáčová, Totemy. Collection of the Bratislava City Gallery.
Cette actualité est affichée en anglais en attendant que sa traduction soit prête.
'Totemy' (Totems), an installation by Anetta Mona Chiça and Lucia Tkáčová, is in its final days at the Bratislava City Gallery. The work has been on view as an intervention on the first floor of the gallery's Pálffy Palace on Panská Street since December 2024 and closes on 25 October 2026. It is curated by Mira Keratová.
The installation is made up of five sculptures formed from burned books set on concrete plinths. In the burning, the individual volumes fused into single sculptural masses, so their titles can no longer be read. According to the gallery, the resulting forms recall familiar geometric models such as Constantin Brâncuși's pedestal sculptures, and their subject links them to the social utopias of the Futurist and Constructivist avant-gardes.
The two artists have long examined the patriarchal frameworks that shape the representation of women. Here, the gallery explains, they treat books as emblems of literacy, regarded as a supposedly masculine and unquestioned sign of progress. Stacked vertically and left fragile by the fire, the charred volumes become imposing, almost irrational totemic figures that resist easy description.
'Totemy' belongs to the Bratislava City Gallery's collection, which acquired it in 2022 with support from the Slovak Arts Council (Fond na podporu umenia) and through a gift from the artists. The gallery has also published a podcast, 'Oči dokorán pre Totemy', in which one of the artists talks about how the work came about and about the pair's long collaboration.
