Hot Coffee with artist Anna K.E.

Anna K.E. is Georgia-born, New York-based and internationally well-known artist focusing on multimedia installations, sculpture, text, video, and performance. In her total installations, the artist engages with themes of temporality, spatial constructs, and questions of origins. K.E. represented Georgia at the Venice Biennale in 2019 and her solo show Dolorem Ipsum just closed at Kestner Gesellschaft, Hanover, Germany. The abstract quality of the artist’s responses below brings out the different reactions from a reader. Somehow you imagine yourself in some new dimension where abstract becomes concrete and then concrete turns into an enveloping porous sphere of influence.

Nina: Imagine you are in your favorite coffee or tea spot. Where is it? What are you drinking? What are the three things you see right now?

Anna: When there is an appointed horizon, the thoughts rotate and investigate the given. Lingering inward-outward realms, where the fine dilemma occurs and connects the links missing between inner and outer natures. There is a posture, that has been hold and defined, in spirit of freedom, in spirit of revel.

Installation view Anna K.E., *Dolorem Ipsum,* Kestner Gesellschaft, Hanover, Germany. Photo courtesy of Galerie Barbara Thumm and the artist. Photo by Volker Crone.

Nina: Please tell me more about your solo show "Dolorem Ipsum" at Kestner Gesellschaft, Hannover, Germany. What prompted this exhibition and how do the works you are presenting fit your practice?

Anna:In this case Adam Budak and Alexander Wilmschen from Kestner Gesellschaft, Hannover, offered me to do a solo show in this remarkable space - that functioned previously in 20th century as a public swimming pool, and in 90's Kestner Gesellschaft moved into the building, occupying the space with their wide-ranged shows and performances.

This specific space gave me the very initial building blocks for the project. I am always eager to allow my artistic intuition – to reach out for new questions that bring with it new materials and new unexpected conversations.

Two opposing spaces that are interconnected with each other, can be perceived as interior/exterior stages for self-exploratory activities.
One of those spaces serves as a rehearsal room, where self-reflection as well as self-discipline is bound to muscle memory. In classical ballet, the endless repetition is trained into the perfection of the mind along with the body. In the rehearsal room, we face a horizontal stream of ballet barres, acting as a virtual expansion and echoing mantra in the space that depicts the repetitive nature of classical ballet. The ballet barres display poetry. The letters are engraved into the wooden beams and are filled with marzipan paste - a highly concentrated substance made of almonds fills the poetic cavities. With the evaporating water, the marzipan slowly turns into marble.

The theme of dehydration and hydration is on display again in the center of the space on a vertical erect monolith - a large LED screen that captures a portrait of the artist in a video piece entitled Peripheral Monday. I use my body fluid, saliva, to continuously cleanse my self-reflection, abstracting and alienating the image by spitting on the camera lens. The scene is recorded with a classical cinematic low-angle shot, where the protagonist is exposed in an over-powering position. It is almost a silent, subtle act of liberation through the divine grace and transgressive potential of the abject applied onto oneself

Nina: Could you pick one work or thread of works currently on view and zero in on it (them)? Why are they presented?

Anna: The “Fountain of Youth” can function as a stage, as well serves as a monument to the East.

The stage reads like a podium of recollections, expectations and anticipated actions yet to unfold. It is constructed with white tiles, a presently dislocated landscape, that is echoing the history of the building and its earlier life as a swimming pool.

2 sound domes, built of metal suspended from the ceiling, mirror the original shape and location of the former swimming pool lamps and expand the memory of its past. The sound domes seemingly project an infinitelydescending pitch, all but an auditory illusion as the pitch in reality is a computer-manipulated sequence that never reaches an end or lowest point.

This sound of a never-ending fall metaphorically refers to a dark drive of an infinite continuity of a process- the regenerating force, the creative urge that keeps us pushing over the boundaries.

The two small pavilions on either side of the space evoke feelings of urban citations - somewhat Soviet bus stations, where self-suspension is resolving into time. Waiting in silence, disobeying tendencies of the self, allows the landscape to transform into an unexpected performance.

Like loose ornaments, one can discover resting dogs in oblique poses populating the tiled stage. They are off duty, maybe sleeping and twisting their bodies into slant positions, signaling their freedom. Their bodies are covered and chiseled in marzipan; once dried out reveal their sugary marbleized existence: frozen in time and space.

In the center of this stage, a characteristic monolith rises. It's a fragile vector, made of thin slightly warped copper pipe, that strives towards the top of the hall. On its end sits a single-valve soviet water faucet, continuously leaking the droplets of water into a circulating fountain that celebrates its own dysfunctionality. Water is the bounding element throughout the show, as well the sound of its fall. The sound of the water that drips from the faucet, and the never ending descending pitch of the 2 sound domes create a cathartic symphony.

Nina: As a person with Georgian heritage how do you identify yourself? Are you a Georgian-American artist? A European artist? Or just an artist and national origin does not matter at this point in time?

Anna: I tend to generalize the notions and swiftly clean up the mess that categorization and interpretation brings with itself. I guess I believe - that being an artist allows one to reach beyond the matter, and to navigate in unoccupied fields. This might free oneself from dogmatic territories and diagnosis.

On top of this I would love to mention a quote that ruptured all the beliefs I ever had, and stands beyond all: “Every existing thing is born without reason, prolongs itself out of weakness, and dies by chance.” Jean-Paul Sartre.

Nina: What role does feminism and family tradition play in your practice? You are the second generation in the family of artists who have an accomplished international career - do you feel that women ahead of you cleared this path or that you are also clearing it one step at a time fighting the glass ceiling of gender identity?

Anna: I am afraid there will always be something to clean up, since the human consciousness tends to create an ongoing cycle of undermined chaos. Thinking of the brilliant movie by Michael Haneke “The White Ribbon”. We will be in this invisible fight, I am tending to call it cold war, but I see the dynamic and the movement that each individual serves as well my inspiring family members, artists and actors etc. they create some sort of metamorphosis, and those attempts add up to the bubbling of the substance and its evaporation into something new.

Nina: Your practice is centered on vibrant connections between words, spaces, and concepts, but also movement as a way to either disrupt or complete these connections. How did you first arrive at this complex approach?

Anna: Many aspects played a role. I would say some of them are - related to my biographical development to move from one country to another, further out to the West from the East. As well as my family, as all of them explore creative territories. I received more and more hints and realizations that there are no borders between me as a human being with my existential worries and questions, and me as an artist with my own unknown path and attempts, and me as an individual who reflects and digests, and me as a spiritual essence that strikes for casual interconnectivity with self and inner urge to find a meaning in higher substance, and finally me as a body that moves and breathes within torture of mind and “a short history of decay” (wonderfully said by E.Cioran).

Nina: Any specific project or show you would like to underline?

Anna: I am excited to be in a totally different dialogue with the new striking historic space, called The Museum Haus Esters, curated by Sylvia Martin.

This building has been an inspiration since my youth, it is a Mies Van Rohe villa located in Krefeld, Germany, that has been transformed into - I used to call it a “chapel” of minimalism and movements in arts since 50’s.

The show will be opening on 06. Oct. 2024 11.30AM.

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