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Thirty-three Situations

Thirty-three Situations
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    • Thirty-three Situations
  • 2015
  • video, color, sound
  • 1h, 48min, 56sec
The video work “Thirty-three Situations” gives an account of Anna Daučíková’s life situation in Moscow and Ukraine during the late 1970s and throughout the 1980s, narrating anecdotes of cases documented in KGB files concerning the observation and bullying of people because of their clandestine same-sex relationships and migratory or Jewish backgrounds. The artist’s own personal life is intertwined in manifold ways with the depiction of several incidents that oscillate between reality and fiction. Slow-motion close-ups of people including artists such as Anthony Auerbach or Ashley Hans Scheirl recall the artistic and intellectual circles in which Daučíková lived, and they alternate with textual reports that reveal forms of oppression as well as spying on people’s actions, sexual predilections, and traveling habits. These situations testify to the multi-gendered reality of a bygone political system and country in which only a binary gender model existed in public. Employing the classic 4:3 format, Daučíková refers to a time when TV presented an orchestrated version of reality that did not know concepts of otherness, let alone transgender lifestyles, but only forms of orderliness that expected everyone to be a “good neighbor.” W.S.