Marie Tučková

📍 Venue → Hospital

Marie Tučková is an artist who works with installations combining performative, audio, and visual elements. These elements are often interconnected through text, transformed into lyrics, a video voice-over, an audio story, or a performance script. Her work investigates the politics of listening, the hierarchy of voices, various forms of collaboration, and the overlapping of political and poetic language. The artist’s new multi-chapter work merges polyphonic songs with poetry and theory through a collaboration with a number of dancers, performers, and musicians. It presents the womb as a site of polyphony and constant sound resonance, investigating the political dimensions of listening in order to overcome the hierarchies between what we perceive as a message and as noise. It further interweaves the stories of fluid bodies—the body of a dead river, standing for dying ecosystems, and the female, trans, and queer body subjected to exploitation by capitalism and reproductive control by the heteronormative, particularly ultra-Christian patriarchy. Conceived as a song for the human animal and more-than-human species, singing and sighing pours out as a liquid from an open wound and as an exhalation in the process of learning through listening.

In collaboration with Mariana Hradilková, Raffia Li, Rebeka Maxová, Iga Świeściak, and Dorota Tučková

The work was produced by the Jindřich Chalupecký Society.

Marie Tučková, a.k.a. Ursula Uwe (*1994 in Prague, Czech Republic), works in the media of text, video, drawing, songwriting, live performance, and installation. Tučková’s work investigates the politics of listening, the hierarchy of voices, polyphony, various forms of collaboration, and the overlapping of political and poetic language. In her work, she draws attention to the connection between the exploitation of nature and female and queer bodies. Her work is based on long-term research, on collaboration, and on improvisation as an endless rehearsal (Wilson Harris). She won the Jindřich Chalupecký Award in 2020. In 2021, she earned an MA in DAI Art Praxis at the Dutch Art Institute. Tučková’s projects have been shown internationally in galleries and spaces including: alpha nova & galerie futura, Prague City Gallery, MeetFactory, JOEY RAMONE, Plato Ostrava, Nevan Contempo, Wellwellwell Vienna, the National Gallery Prague, Display, Centre Tchèque de Paris, Mains d’Oeuvres, AQB ProjectSpace, Franzensfest / Fortezza, and others.

Installation view (c) Jonáš Verešpej