Microsozial | Anna Witt

Opening: 11 March 2008, 7 pm
Anna Witt
in conversation with Julienne Lorz , Associate Curator, Haus der Kunst , München

Working with performative intervention and video installation, Anna Witt’s practice deals with the construction of cultural stereotypes and individuals’ supremacist positioning within social systems. Her works ambivalently sit between fictional re-enactment and documentary staging and represents the problematic of subject-formation in relation to identity politics, collective racism and citizenship rights. Her video installation "Roles" (2008) confuses our expectations by employing Black and Middle-Eastern actors who improvise with overloaded excess the role of a radical right-wing white Skinhead. The audio plays a conversation between the artist and these culturally-diverse professionals active in a German-speaking media sphere, who insinuate how their work and personal experiences depend on, to borrow a definition by Frantz Fanon, the inscription of race on the skin.
Witt is interested in investigating the enunciation of roles in a society which understands itself equal and tolerant, a perspective suggesting the constitutive function of “the look” as a site of power-knowledge, as her video "Heimfront" (2007) describes. Realised during a residency in The Netherlands, the work is a reaction to a topic analysed in the Dutch media such as that of slack political activism. Here she asked strangers to create a banner protesting against phenomena disliked in public space. Separating once again images and audio, we hear the artist asking a passer-by to offer a solution to the problem. Similarly, in “Empower Me” (2007) the artist invites passer-bys to act the role of seized hostages commonly appearing as footage on TV news. Faithful to her unexpected conceptual turns, it is the artist to play the part of their captor, pronouncing the demands of her kidnappees to instigate in the viewer a sense of urgency in taking up a more active stance in political life. (DB)

Anna Witt
Born in 1981 in Wasserburg am Inn, Germany. Diploma at the Academy of Fine Arts Munich (Prof. Magdalena Jetelová), since 2005 enrolled in the Fine Arts study program at the Academy of Fine Arts Vienna (Prof. Monica Bonvicini). 2006 laureate of the Leif Rumke Price .

Exhibitions (group shows, selection) | 2007  “Empower me”, Raum 58, Munich, Germany; “Before Property”, Werkstatt, Dordrecht, The Netherlands; “Legally”, Hyperion Tavern, Los Angeles, USA | 2006  “Bonny Prince Germans”, Low Salt, Glasgow, Great Britain; “Heimfront”, EntoderwederGalerie, Dorfen, Germany; “Traurig sicher, im Training” , Steirischer Herbst, Grazer Kunstverein, Austria; “St. Mungo and me” , Lightbox, Los Angeles, USA | 2005 “Ghostakademie” , Rathausgalerie Munich, Germany; “München”, el Particular, Mexico City, Mexico | 2004  “So klappt’s. Modelle des Gelingens”, station 52.01, Künstlerhaus Mousonturm, Frankfurt, Germany | 2003  “Einblicke”, Haus der Kunst, Munich, Germany