“Lukáčová comes up with a brilliant language combining rapper jargon with the argot of the banking sector and minorities. It bubbles non-aggressively, becoming a mantra that in each verse illustrates our rooted and all-pervasive dependency on financial institutions, revolving credit, and the desire for capital success and at least basic social status.”
Excerpt from the curatorial text by Edith Jeřábková
ANCURVATION
Incomprehensible, multi-narrative video about tennis-playing cyborgs in real and virtual space, which refers to the enthusiasm of the 60s and tries to deconstruct the period’s bright vision of the future through selected areas of an abandoned bathhouse. The video features a strange tutorial on “how to measure gravitational waves”.
The main characters try to enjoy the dismal place while running out of time. Will their measurement exercises get them more free time, implying that time is relative? Seemingly random actions to kill free time start to turn into work. Followed by a brief narrative about the mysterious fairy and animals who coexist together in some way.
BONITA
Shortened curatorial text by Edith Jeřábková / […] Based on her study of the history of witch trials, Silvie Federici unravels the connection between the exploitation of women and unpaid domestic labour, which played a central role in the process of capitalist accumulation. The first stage in the introduction of the capitalist system was the disciplining of the body, a process that impacted greatly on women, who had to be deprived of their independence and social power. They had to be tamed and bound to home, family and husband, and had to perform their household duties for free so that their husbands might participate in the growth of capital undisturbed. “The witch was the communist and terrorist of her time, which required a ‘civilising’ drive to produce the new ‘subjectivity’ and sexual division of labour on which the capitalist work discipline would rely…” writes Silvia Federici in her new book. She was prompted to write the book by the ongoing witch-hunts taking place in countries such as India, Nepal, Papua-New Guinea, Central Africa, Islamic State, Saudi Arabia, which demonstrate where the new forms of accumulation and colonisation have relocated and how the interrelated relationships between market mechanisms and the weakening of the agency of women operate, leading to the destabilisation of territorial, tribal and family ties.
[…] Until recently, land in Africa was a shared good, and women farmed it. However, with the entry of the World Bank it had, it goes without saying, to be registered in order to become the subject of loans and business. Women were forced to abandon their self-sufficient production and to become assistants to their husbands in the production of goods. It is often older women and women who work their own land that are the targets of witch-hunts in Africa. Those doing the hunting are young members of the community, sometimes even of the family. The division of male and female labour is also problematic, with plenty of employment opportunities for men in armed jobs – building security guards, corporate security services, prison officers, membership in gangs, the mafia, the army, etc. – thus increasing the toxic masculinity of the male population.
In the 1970s, feminists themselves embraced the myth of the witch in the Italian activist campaign for wages for housework and the legalisation of abortion, adopting the slogan: “Tremble, tremble, the witches have returned!”, and linked up feminist movements around the world. At present the iconography of witchcraft is experiencing a renascence as a practice that reveals new possibilities above and beyond the dualist perception of the world. Modern witchcraft is the fastest growing new religion at present.
Wicca is the largest and most widespread offshoot of neo-paganism and comprises a diverse group of religious movements claiming to be derived from historical pagan religions. Modern witchcraft spread after the fall of the countercultures of the 1960s. The American Religious Identification Survey (ARIS) estimated that in 2008 there were around 600,000 neo-pagans in the United States, of which roughly half identified as Wiccan. According to some estimates, in 2017 there were more than three million practicing Wiccans. In esoteric circles the term “witch” is gender neutral and can refer to both men and women. At the heart of the Wicca shared faith (like other forms of modern witchcraft) is the acceptance and practice of magic. […] Magic as such is not supernatural. It is as natural as gravitation and wind and often involves a combination of invocation, movement, rhythm, music, meditation and instruments that are used in such a way as to operate on a subtle, energetic or quantum level of reality.
If we accept that magic is not simply something practiced in the “primitive” stages of societies but is present in the very heart of the modern regime (as many writers such as Theodor Adorno and Arjun Appaduraio concede), we will understand more easily Marie Lukáčová’s interest in creating a form of magic in opposition to that of economic growth and the circulation of capital.
Lukáčová is not so much interested in the eccentric witch operating on the margins of society, but in strong female and male witch figures fully established within the neoliberal system who, with the effortlessness of ordinary skills and abilities combined with routine work, facilitate the flow of capital through the landscape, which they are able to move and transform at will with merely a few clicks on their mobile. The cumulative cloud is a new form of capital that feeds on information, including the most private and intimate, to which relationships, marriages, desire, stories, the imagination and art are subject. Everything is viewed as an investment. Lukáčová shows how the economic sector has co opted the practices of witches, how the movement of capital is magical and the language and system of economic wizards is hermetic. By appropriating mainstream male rap and a feminist-accented witchcraft, the artist achieves a double augmentation. The transformability of polyamory, sex and morphing monsters then holds out the hope of an escape from the capitalist design of the nuclear family. / Text by Edith Jeřábková
GRRRRRRRRRRRRRLZ prod. Filip Kraus
1/ Take nude lips to nude
nude face and nude hair
(IIII) love trinket
love dough too
2 / Let cash stay with me
Forever, forever, yeah
Let cash rustle, god
Like ASMR, eeah
3/ You should try some tricks
You should buy some blink
Lips like Lela eaah
I’m wheedling
4/ You can make a dick pic
Send me your dick
Hold forth a story
tell me you’re doing something big
5/ Amore more mio eeah, A young playboy ahah,
eah, Grown out gel nails, But prob not todaaay
6/ amore more mio eeah. A young playboy ahah,
eah. Hold forth a story eeah. Tell me you’re doing something big
7/ Let cash stay with me
Forever, forever, yeah
Let cash rustle, my god
Like ASMR eeah
1/ take nude lips to nude,
nude face and nude hair,
(IIII) love trinket, love dough too
2/ Let cash rustle, god, forever forever yaaa
Let cash stay with me. Like MM in a cage, aaah
3/ feigning I won’t let you go, pretending you’re a king
Tell me what to do, No deficiencies
You should try some tricks, you should buy some blinks
Pery just like Lela eaah
I’m wheedling
4/ You can pull my plait
You can pant like a bull
Hold forth a story
Tell me you’re doing something big
You can make a dick pic
Send me your dick
Hold forth a story
tell me you’re doing something big
5/ Bella caio bella eeah
Hubba bubba ahah eeah
(my) – trinket on the chin
But prob not todaaay (note: goldish)
amore more mio eeah
A young playboy ahah, eah
Grown out gel nails
But prob not todaaay
6/ bella ciao bella eeah
hubba bubba ahah eeah
hold forth a story
tell me you’re doing something big
7/ aka2/ Let cash rustle, god
Forever forever yeeah
Let cash stay with me
Like MMA in a cage aaa
BIO / Marie Lukáčová (*1991) graduated from Prague’s Academy of Architecture, Art and Design , also studied at the VUT Faculty of Arts in Brno and Kunstakademie Mainz, Germany. She’s one of the founders of the feminist group Fourth Wave (Čtvrtá vlna) that has initiated a public debate on sexism at universities in 2017. Predominantly, she works with the media of video and video installation whilst her footages reshape the hallmarks borrowed from the areas of politics, mythology, geology or other sciences. Her works move across different time planes and locations, and through specific narratives and poetics, they touch on the issues of the uncertain future. Lukáčová introduced her work primarily to the Czech independent art scene but also in Wrocław, Poland, Ljubljana, Slovenia, or Stuttgart, Germany.
Artworks & Texts / Marie Lukáčová
Curatorial Text / Edith Jeřábková
