Artist: Anetta Mona Chișa
Title: The Growing Argument
Venue: Zahorian & Van Espen, Bratislava
Curator: Silvia Van Espen
Photo: Leontína Berková
Imagine matter is a dense, non-subjective and affirming force, dancing silently on chemical interactions, crystallizing passions, trickling bodily discharges, crying etymological resonance with motherhood, cracking micro-violent novelty, crashing into quantum events and crafting eerie entanglements.
Imagine matter doing whatever it feels like doing.
Think temporally about material, rather than spatially. As form become formation, objects become events. Matter is four-dimensional. Growth is the consciousness of the matter-in-flux.
Imagine new structures without submitting them to hierarchical control and without imposing on them a hylomorphic model. Imagine an argument against both the hylomorphism and the teleological fixation with form and function that still intoxicate ways of thinking and practicing art. Imagine matter as possessing its own immanent, intensive resources for the generation of form from within. Expression instead impression.
Imagine all materials as active materials, charged with morphogenetic capabilities. Our goal is that of luring a form out of them, of guiding through a series of processes the emergence of a shape, a shape in which the materials themselves have a say. We’re a mere player in a big theatre of possibilities.
Imagine that plaster, seeds, rocks, hair, dust, bring to light a life proper to these materials, a vital state of matter as such, a vitality that doubtless exists everywhere but is ordinarily hidden or covered, rendered unrecognizable by the grand narratives of the past.
Imagine entering a reality simultaneously intensified and flattened, in which no ontological regime is prioritized and the hierarchy between kingdoms (vegetable, mineral, digital) is disregarded.
Imagine a situation between change and permanence. We’re facing the paradox of things maintaining their identity while undergoing transformation, the oddity of moving while staying still, the discordance of coinciding objects.
Imagine the matter is a flow. Then we can only follow it. | Anetta Mona Chișa
Anetta Mona Chișa (*1975, Nadlac) is an artist of Romanian origin who lives and works in Prague. Between the years 1994 and 2000, she studied at the Academy of Fine Arts in Bratislava. In 2006, together with Lucia Tkáčová she was the Oskár Čepan Award laureate. Her solo and collaborative projects include exhibitions in tranzit.sk, Bratislava (2006); Centre for Contermporary Art Futura, Prague (2006); Neuer Berliner Kunstverein, Berlin (2008); Christine Koenig Gallery, Vienna (2011) or in Waterside Contemporary, London (2013). She also exhibited at the 54th Venice Biennale (2011). Chisa participated in group exhibitions in National Museum of Contemporary Art in Bucharest; at the 10th Manifesta in St. Petersburg; in Kunstrau Kreuzberg/Bethanien, Berlin; CONTEXT Art Miami; tranzit.ro, Bucharest; Cultuurcentrum Strombeek, Grimbergen; Whitechapel Gallery, London; at the 3rd Moscow International Biennale for Young Art; in Museum of Art, Łódź; Thyssen-Bornemisza Art Contemporary, Vienna; MUMOK, Vienna and at the 29th Ljubljana Biennial of Graphic Arts.
