VIENNA.- Anna Witt’s artistic practice is performative, participatory, and political. She creates situations that reflect interpersonal relationships and power structures as well as conventions of speaking and acting.
The Belvedere 21 is showing her first solo exhibition at a Viennese institution. It consists of three video installations along with photographs and texts that shine a light on various aspects of our ideas around “work.”
“The art of Anna Witt stands out for presenting thematic focal points regarding how we live together; it is a practice in which social, political, and economic parameters are reflected in ways that enable them to be experienced and debated. In the context of “Spirit of 68,” this year’s program motto at the Belvedere 21, which is dedicated to the relevance of the social struggles and achievements of the sixties movement in the present day, these observations on the relationship of subject, work, and society appear to have a special importance,” says Stella Rollig, General Director of the Belvedere and Belvedere 21.
Anna Witt involves passersby in public spaces, or specifically selected people and groups, into her performative experimental arrangements, usually in a directly physical way. This forms the basis for her video installations. The tasks range from repeated imitation of specifically coded gestures to the development of complex choreographies, and give the participants opportunities for individual articulation and authorship. With curiosity and empathy for her counterpart, Anna Witt explores the borders between the self and the other and tries to activate the individual’s capacity for action, which she understands as a prerequisite for community and society.
The artist describes her basic method as follows: “I make a space of action available to people, which they can organize themselves. Verbal and non-verbal articulations then open up spaces where our way of living together can be thought through and redefined.”
In recent years, Anna Witt has realized a whole series of artistic projects on the relationship between the individual, work, and society. These projects enable us to experience current forms of subjectivization that are part of daily life and therefore often invisible. How do we become who we are? What do we do, what do we believe in, what do we fight for? And how is this social self connected to visible and invisible mechanisms, norms and rules of our society? Anna Witt’s first solo exhibition at a Viennese institution consists of three video installations along with photographs and text. In addition to the 3-channel video installation Flexitime (2010), the work Beat Body (2016-18) is being shown for the first time in a version composed of four video sculptures. These are supplemented and contextualized by the photo/text work Under the Pavement (2016). On the occasion of this exhibition, Anna Witt produced the 5-channel video essay Body in Progress (2018) in the adjacent urban-development area around the new Vienna Central Station.
“In the exhibition at Belvedere 21 Anna Witt both illuminates the mechanisms of ascribing value and social position to certain professions, as well as the meaning of historical gestures and symbols of collective organized labor in times of radical individualization. And she explores possible utopias where the concept of work and life differs from our cycle of constant commitment and self-optimization,” explains Curator Luisa Ziaja. “Her approach to given conditions is neither naive nor cynical. Instead, she tries to elicit small adjustments to our perception and our actions that open up perspectives for community beyond the dominant social patterns.”
Anna Witt, born in Wasserburg am Inn, Germany in 1981. She lives and works in Vienna.
Solo exhibitions: 2016: Kunst Halle Sankt Gallen; Kunstraum München; Simultanhalle Köln; Galerie Tanja Wagner, Berlin / 2015: Kunstraum Lakeside, Klagenfurt; 8. Salon, Hamburg; GfzK – Galerie für Zeitgenössische Kunst, Leipzig / 2014: Center for Contemporary Art, Pristina / 2013: Marabouparken Museum, Stockholm / 2012: Janco Dada Museum, Ein Hod / 2011: Magazin 4; Bregenzer Kunstverein; Salzburger Kunstverein/Kabinett, o. T. Raum für aktuelle Kunst, Lucerne 2010: Galerie Michael Wiesehöfer, Cologne; Lothringer13 – Städtische Kunsthalle München; Grazer Kunstverein
