Anetta Mona Chisa
b. 1975 in Romania
Lucia Tkacova
b. 1977 in Slovakia
www.chitka.info
Chitka is an artist group formed by Anetta Mona Chisa and Lucia Tkacova who live and work in Prague and Bratislava. They have been collaborating since 2000 and work as both artists and curators. Many of their works are contextual, based on personal stories and their collaborative practice takes a youthful, whimsical look with scorn and humour at the machinations of the art world, politics, questions of gender and access to and perception of different forms of power; professional, political, ideological, and geographical. They share an interest in interrogating capitalist practices and in particular the commodification of art, a subject on which they based the project Private Collection (ongoing since 2005). This installation of banal paraphernalia stolen from famous private art galleries in Paris, Berlin, London, Vienna and New York was an attempt ‘to undermine the traditional orthodoxies of a capitalist market and to produce an autonomous value zone’. While in the video Dialectics of Subjection #4 (2006) some of the most powerful men in world politics are submitted to the artists’ girly critique. Rather than form their analysis on political and moral standards, they sift through these internationally renowned men, as if they are catalogue models, based on the main criteria for fame and adoration in popular culture – sexual attractiveness.
Selected exhibitions of Chitka’s work include those at Skuc Gallery, 2007, Ljubljana; Gallery West, 2007, De Hague; Karlin Hall, 2007, Prague; Kosova Art Gallery, 2006, Prishtina; Tranzit Gallery, 2006, Bratislava; and Art in General, 2005, New York.