Marie Tučková is a prominent representative of the current generation of artists born in the early 1990s. She made her name on the art scene as the creator of multimedia installations on the border between visual, performative and applied art with a focus on sound and music. Notwithstanding these media, Tučková’s work initially developed through her studies of art photography at the Secondary Industrial School of Graphic Arts in Prague (Hellichovka), whence she continued her studies at the studio led by Aleksandra Vajd and Hynek Alt, Vjera Borozan and Martin Kohout at the Academy of Arts, Architecture and Design in Prague (UMPRUM).
A sensitivity to the 2D visuality of photography qua medium is still present in her work, but now translated into the moving image, both in her videos and in the documentation of performances, which becomes an increasingly important part of her work. Tučková’s bachelor dissertation, begun during her internship at the Bezalel Academy in Jerusalem, had already anticipated this way of working. Her geographic separation from the context of the photograph she studied at her alma mater led her to return to activities that had been close to her during her adolescence. She had received a classical music education at a basic art school, but was also a member of the Disman Radio Children’s Ensemble, which trains up theatre, radio and film actors. By writing the script for the performance Sedm sester z Moany Hebe / The Seven Sisters of Moana Hebe, she returned to these activities in a roundabout way. Henceforth, the artist’s work reflects not only her obvious interest in sound and music, but also the influence of her Christian upbringing. Both are manifest in work featuring multiple voices, e.g. in relation to choral singing or church prayers. At the same time, this has led her to broader considerations of the appropriateness of the chosen medium, i.e. how to most eloquently express a particular kind of content through a particular artistic genre.
The textual component is an important part of her work, connecting the individual media, whether this be through script, video voiceover, audio stories or song lyrics. This somewhat experimental approach was lent added impetus by Tučková’s Master’s studies at the Dutch Art Institute Art Praxis, which followed up on a non-hierarchical way of learning (e.g. the absence of studios & the master-apprentice model) that the artist had been introduced to in the Studio Without Supervisor during her undergraduate studies at UMPRUM. The principles of (non-)hierarchy were eventually explored in her thesis The Polyphonic Womb: On Non-Hierarchal Sound, the influence and foreshadowing of which can be traced across the artist’s entire practice.
In the early years, Tučková was mainly involved with new technologies and the impact of social media on human perception, language, the expression of emotions and hence the psychological state of humankind. This was evident in works such as Ursula Uwe: Monumenty lásky / Ursula Uwe: Monuments of Love (2017, the first part of the trilogy Sedm sester z Moany Hebe), You Are Looking for Love in All the Wrong Places (2017) and I Think You’re Funny, Haha (2017). The central motif of Monuments of Love, for which Tučková received the Exist Prize in 2017 (a competition for students of Czech and Slovak art schools), is the establishment of relationships, and reveals the sharp divide between physically experienced phenomena (the regularity of the regime, the weight of one’s own body and feelings) and abstract communication by smart phone. The use of an alter ego, in this case Ursula Uwe, appears for the first time, and is a tool that allows Tučková to objectify situations or weave together stories of someone else’s sensibility when not drawing on autobiographic content. This is also the purpose of collective performance, which, in addition to emphasising non-hierarchism, also allows her to project fictional characters through other people and bodies and to bridge the gap between the “self” and the “other”, one of the artist’s pivotal themes. The installation Monumenty lásky consists of a scene set within an abstract timelessness complemented by objects and a canvas printed with text. In it, a group of seven cyborgs talk about love without having ever experienced it, and their language and intonation is as technologically cold as their uniform body-coloured exercise costumes (designed by Mikuláš Brukner). The delivery of most of the text is carried out in the form of a Greek chorus, synchronised and clear, in discordant keys, with the content comprising either poems written using Instagram hashtags or the script of a play. The first movement ends with a song about communicating on Facebook and climaxes with a shouted “I love you!”. The trilogy Sedm sester z Moany Hebe was capped with a graduate performance of Ursula Uwe: Jaro přišlo ještě dřív než zima / Ursula Uwe: Spring Came Before Winter in the courtyard of UMPRUM, where the bodies of the seven sisters symbolically became one within a common costume.
The second and third works referred to above share several features in terms of form and content with the first, despite being videos. In You Are Looking for Love in All the Wrong Places we see, through the artist’s voice and a 3D scan of her face, the impossibility of establishing a loving relationship with Siri, who is limited by her operating system. In I Think You’re Funny, Haha we follow four performers who, with original rhythmic music and the artist’s delivery of hollowed out phrases, coalesce in a performance of the folk song Kebych bola jahodú / If I were a Strawberry. In the given situation this acts as a metaphor for the unfulfilled longing for love in virtual space. Tučková’s relationship to folk musicianship is also evident, as it is in her participation in the women’s choir Lada, which she founded with friends (at the other end of the spectrum is her participation in what was originally the student synth-pop duo Cloudy Babies, which she founded with the artist Eva Rybářová under the influence of the post-internet). This period is closed with a performance that took place in Prague’s Světozor cinema as part of the screening of the Czech premiere of the documentary film Donna Haraway: Story Telling for Earthly Survival (2016) about the eponymous philosopher and feminist historian of science and technology.
At the turn of 2018 and 2019, the exhibition Episode One: Bunny’s Departure took place at the Colloredo-Mansfeld Palace as part of the Start Up series. The work represented a change of direction for Tučková. While the project again deals with a fictional being (the inspiration was the worldbuilding resulting from conversations with the artist’s brother) and with virtual constraints (specifically anonymity), the actual articulation of this problem is via a distinctly material form – the exhibition featured crocheted masks and monumental backdrops in the form of a shelter for Bunny’s narrative. As expected, the installation was accompanied by a sung and spoken melodic multi-voiced narrative. Like crochet, multi-voicing (or polyphony, which the artist works with in later works) can in a sense be seen as the weaving of a unified bundle from many smaller parts that stand in opposition to a toxic and often heroicised individualism.
This year, Tučková continued her textile work at the Studio of Creativity and Laboratory For Associate Dreaming (ATLAS), a new space of the National Gallery in the vestibule of Veletržní Palace, to which she contributed a collective work entitled Popletená slova na jazyku slunce / Confused Words on Tongue of the Sun, the crocheted form of which she created, in harmony with the community character of the venue, with seniors from the non-profit Elpida Centre supporting an active life for senior citizens (M. Čížková, M. Horynová, M. Hrobařová, A. Kolešová, J. Lomnická, P. Nelibová, A. Paráková, D. Píšová and P. Tůmová – Tučková was herself taught to crochet by her grandmother)
In 2020, Tučková was a finalist in the 31st annual Jindřich Chalupecký Award. At the final exhibition at the PLATO Gallery in Ostrava, she presented Chorus, a flat crocheted construction, this time accompanied by a five-channel and five-voice polyphonic sound installation. During Jury Weekend a performance took place of Sis of Styxx in the form of improvisation alternating with single and multiple voice concert.
Tučková’s return from the Netherlands to Prague was preceded by her dissertation referred to above, entitled The Polyphonic Womb: On Non-Hierarchical Sound, followed conceptually by exhibitions and performances of the same name in Amsterdam, Liberec, at the Prague Biennial Ve věci umění (Matter of Art) and at the sixth Move festival at the Centre Pompidou in Paris. The outcome was a film made in collaboration with Iga Świeściak, Raffia Li, Dorota Tučková, Mariana Hradilková and Rebeka Maxová. In short, the five-act work deals with issues of non-hierarchical audio and collective survival and explores the politics of listening, including the process of learning to listen. “The work is conceived as a song for human animals and species transcending the human. Songs and sighs drip like fluid from an open wound, like an exhalation in the process of learning through listening.” (source: https://matterof.art/cz/2022/vystava/vfn-10, accessed 29 June 2023)
In Tučková’s conception, listening becomes a moment of sharing and transformation and is thus a contrast to the anthropocentric “exploitation” of the world. The Polyphonic Womb is a space saturated with a constant stream of intertwining sounds that tune in and harmonise with each other, while its theoretical background applies arguments drawing on the analogy between discrimination against women or queer communities and the exploitation of nature (the artist uses the metaphor of a dead river) in contemporary capitalist culture. As Karen Barad, an American feminist, puts it: “‘Humans’ are neither pure cause nor pure effect, but part of the world in its open-ended becoming.” An important recurring theme in Tučková’s work is also nature: its cyclicality, regularity, interconnectedness, life energy, death and sexuality, and, ultimately, a certain spirituality embedded deep within it.
In Wet Scores for Listening Tučková turns directly to specific watercourses – the Vltava, the Olza and the Rokytka – and works with motifs of water and human and superhuman fluids. By this means she explores themes already characteristic of her work: the politics of active listening (the dichotomy between communication and noise); deep listening (a concept associated with the music theorist and composer Pauline Oliveros); the hierarchy of voices and polyphony; folk musicianship; improvisation; and collective ways of working. Several hours of listening to water flowing and automatic writing resulted in an improvised music-making that references Theodor Wilson Harris’s essay The Music of Living Landscapes, while symbolically alluding to the daily transience in the superhuman cycles of nature.
New ways of finding a unified voice and body are most evident in Tučková’s latest project The Ensemble of Moans, which she presented first at the Boogie Woogie neighbourhood festival organised by the hunt kastner gallery in Žižkov’s Bethlehem Chapel and then again at the Move festival at the Centre Pompidou. The performance took the form of a vocal concert, a staccato of multi-part singing celebrating the power of gathered bodies and voices, their birth and overflow into an aggregate of sounds, a harmony. Above all, the situatedness of the Prague performance served as a suitable backdrop for a critique of systems based on a patriarchal hierarchy. Here the interconnectedness of the recent The Ensemble of Moans with the ideas behind the graduate work The Polyphonic Womb – an attempt to express aurally the sounds emanating from the interior of beings and nature – becomes apparent. It is no coincidence that the ancient Greek term πνεῦμα (pneuma) refers to air in motion, breath, wind and, in a religious context, also spirit or soul.
Marie Tučková can be included in the generation of artists strongly influenced by the internet and new media. However, it is fascinating to see how this generation is struggling with the process of materialising the themes it wants to deal with and express. This young artist’s practice involves the creation of sophisticated sensibilities that combine the visual and the tactile, craft and technology, the meditative and the sacred, text and sound, and their presentation in the medium of collective performance. In September of this year, Tučková will publish the book Sedm sester z Moany Hebe / Seven Sisters of Moana Hebe, based on scripts for a three-part performance about Ursula Uwe, which is being prepared under the auspices of the UMPRUM publishing house and features illustrations by Kristýna Fingerland. The trilogy will thus come to a symbolic end. It is a work that pushed the artist’s thinking beyond the professionally defined boundaries of photography and resulted in the composition of polyphonic pieces. It is these that Tučková will focus on this autumn during the finalisation of her debut album during an internship at Paris Cité Internationale.
