Crushing Destiny. Performance by Andi Kacziba

Raffaella De Chirico presents Crushing Destiny, a performance by Hungarian-born artist Andi Kacziba. The event will take place on 16 April 2023 inside the Sala delle Colonne della Fabbrica del Vapore in via Giulio Cesare Procaccini, 4, in Milan. The public is invited to attend the performative action that will take place at 4:00 p.m. The space will be open from 3:00 p.m. for reception and press preview and from 4.30 p.m. onwards there will be light refreshments to thank the attendees until 6:00 p.m.
Crushing Destiny represents the final chapter of a long reflection carried out by the artist on the female figure within contemporary society, held on the closing day of two major Milanese art events, MiArt and Milano Art Week. The performance aims to accept the end of an era and at the same time open towards a new era of its existence, on the occasion of the artist's fiftieth birthday. The centre of the Fabbrica del Vapore's Column Room will be occupied by a large white painting canvas over which 500 eggs, previously emptied of their liquid and filled with gold, will be placed. The artist, accompanied by the cadenced sound of a metronome, will walk barefoot over each egg, performing a sort of ritual and cathartic practice, aimed at liberation from the past. A woman during the unfolding of her fertile cycle produces approximately 500 mature eggs, symbolically represented precisely by the 500 eggs that will be crushed by Kacziba herself. Every break, every step constitutes a reflection on being a woman, as well as symbolising the progress of life between the different missed occasions of a motherhood that, in Kacziba's case, was sought but not obtained. A personal search, therefore, but with universal hues. Inside the Sala delle Colonne, there will also be thirteen 40 x 50 cm prints, images from Polaroids that are the remaining testimonies of the previous three performative acts carried out by the artist.
Crushing Destiny is the fourth and final performance with which Andi Kacziba ends the performance cycle that began in 2018, an act that came together in the exhibition Turning (g)old, held in the Turin spaces of the art gallery of Raffaella De Chirico. On this occasion the artist covers the wrinkles of her face with a mixture of vinavil glue and gold to highlight the signs of the passage of time and capture the physiological changes of her body, with its losses and new acquisitions. Silent Childlessness is the second performative act dated 2019, when Kacziba, in a sitting position and with half a watermelon between her legs, used a knife to empty the fruit from its pulp, a metaphor for the womb and the occasions of motherhood that faded over the years. The third performance takes place in 2022 in Milan in the gallery of Raffaella De Chirico when Andi Kacziba on the occasion of 8 March, International Women's Day, offers her organs to visitors with provocative and symbolic intent.
Take my heart asks what a woman who is no longer young can still offer society after a series of unconventional and nonconformist choices. There will also be two prints of Turning (g)old, the entire cycle of Silent Childlessness with nine prints and two prints of Take my heart.
The common thread of Andi Kacziba's long and profound artistic research is the perception of the feminine, expressed through themes that are of importance to the artist, such as the ageing process, motherhood and its absence, career and disparities. Raffaella De Chirico knows this well: "Kacziba performs a liberating and healing act with Crushing Destiny: she has healed her skin with gold, she has self-inflicted a symbolic hysterectomy, she has deprived herself of vital organs by staging a sale. Now, in the end, when the need to work only on her body is gone, Andi must trample on and shatter her destiny. This is the psychomagic act that will put an end to the process from which the acceptance of a cycle of life will result." Andi Kacziba uses performative action as a form of catharsis that is not only personal but also collective. Gold opens and closes these six years of narration by the artist who says: "The true Alchemy is to turn pain and wounds into gold". The artistic research carried out by Andi Kacziba will be merged into an artist's book that will be published at the end of this year.
Andi Kacziba’s Biography
Andi Kacziba, was born in Hungary in 1974, she completed her studies at the Casus Kortárs Müvészeti Kollégium of Budapest and later on at the European Institute of Design of Milan and Venice. Andi Kacziba lives in Italy since 1997 where she worked as a model, and later devoted herself to photography. Her first cycles of works express through the laborious manual weaving of rope, the strength, tenacity and capacity for endurance of women who, deluded by the feminist movements of the 1960s and 1970s into believing that they had finally obtained the equal rights and dignity they were entitled to and had ardently fought for, find themselves today, in contemporary western society, transformed into mere status symbols, accessories and attributes of male vanity. Her works of art became a metaphor for the daily struggle every woman is still facing in the 21st century. Andi Kacziba has shown her works in numerous solo and group exhibitions, at the Hungarian Academy in Rome, at the Studio Museo Francesco Messina in Milan, at the Pier Alessandro Garda Civic Museum in Ivrea, at the Italian Institute of Culture in Budapest, at the the Italian Institute of Culture in Mexico City and at the Fondation Suisse in Paris. Since 2014 She collaborates with Raffaella de Chirico Arte Contemporanea.
Kindly remember to comunicate your attendance to the following e-mail address crushingdestiny.performance@gmail.com as indicated in the flyer that you find attached.