Nora Ružičková (with Marianna Mlynárčiková)
Bio
Nóra Ružičková (born 1977, Bratislava) has studied painting and printmaking (1996 – 2002) and defended her doctoral theses in 2009 at the Academy of Fine Arts and Design in Bratislava; between 2009 and 2018 she has been teaching there at the Department of Intermedia and Multimedia.
As an artist she is active in the fields of visual art and literature. In her visual arts projects she uses different mediums and forms of expression; in the last years she has been particularly interested in examining the institutionalization and categorization of art and the relationship between visuality and textuality.
She is the author of five poetry collections: Micronauts (Mikronauti, 1998), Arrangement and Attack (Osnova a útok, 2000), Facelessness (Beztvárie, 2004), Air Plotting (Parcelácia vzduchu, 2007), Shore Research (Pobrežný výskum, 2009) and the book of experimental poetry and prose Work & Intimacy (Práce & Intimita, 2012).
Marianna Mlynárčiková & Nóra Ružičková has been working in tandem since 2004. They engage mostly in work with appropriated texts and images and participatory projects done in collaboration with various communities. They thematise the context of art and its relationships with amateur discourse and life, interdisciplinary overlaps, and the representation of other cultures in our artistic and cultural context.
Together they presented many art project, such as: Someone in between, 2004; There Will Be Further Opportunities for Discussion, 2007; Second Hand, 2012; Laboratory Art History, 2013; Hundred Years of Gaptology, 2014; Exercise with Monograhs, 2016; Ceci n'est pas de la bryndza, 2017/18. Their work was published in magazines Vlna, Kloaka, Vertigo and Romboid.
Bouvard and Pécuchet Explore the Field of Slovak Art
2014
In collaboration with Marianna Mlynárčiková and community theatre Divadlo z pasáže, in the roles of self-taught scholars: Miriam Kujanová and Dana Snopková, Full-HD video, 89 min.
The movie is based on a satirical novel written by Gustave Flaubert. Bouvard et Pécuchet is the narrative of two loony Parisian bachelors who work as copy clerks. They share common interests and a distaste for their fate of sitting behind desks all day. When Bouvard inherits a small fortune, the two buy a farm in Normandy, to which they retire and begin their exploration of various fields of knowledge. They move from one specialization to another, starting with study of theory from books and manuals, which they thereafter try to apply in practice. Again and again they reach their limitations (or limits of the knowledge itself) and fail. After repeating this scenario too many times, they give up and revert to their initial task of copying. The roles of self-taught scholars were performed by two actresses from the Theatre from the Passage (Divadlo z pasáže), a community theatre which cooperates with differently abled people. In the movie, we watch the progress of their studies of art and art theory and their re/creating of chosen artworks. The viewer witnesses the process of art making as well as immersion and creative passion of two participants and their struggle with language and matter. The difference in the mental make-up of the protagonists is an important semantic aspect of the work. Through their interpretative activity, we hold a mirror up to the art world and also to ourselves as artists.
The work was presented as part of the exhibition:
Sto rokov skulinárstva/One Hundred Years of Gaptology, curated by Jaroslav Šrank, 28. 8. – 21. 9. 2014, Galéria 19/Gallery 19, Bratislava
For a photoreport of the exhibition, go to: http://www.artalk.cz/2014/09/15/sto-rokov-skulinarstva/
The curatorial text was published in the catalogue:
ŠRANK, Jaroslav: Sto rokov skulinárstva/One Hundred Years of Sculinary. In: Galéria 19 = 5 rokov/Gallery 19 = 5 Years. Galéria 19, Bratislava 2015.
The work was analysed by one of its authors in her dissertation thesis:
MLYNARČÍKOVÁ, Marianna: Inter-textuálne prostredie: Intertextualita ako nástroj inštitucionálnej kritiky/Inter-textual Medium: Intertextuality as a Tool of Institutional Critique. Dissertation thesis, Akadémia umení v Banskej Bystrici, Fakulta výtvarných umení, Banská Bystrica 2016.
