Summer School as School
3-18 July, 2016
Public Program
Saturday, 16 July 2016 at 19:00
Anna Witt: Walking through walls
Venue: Boxing Club
Mark Isaku St. Prishtina
Republic of Kosovo
For the SSAS 2016 at Stacion - Center for Contemporary Art Prishtina, Anna Witt will give an introduction in her most recent project "Walking through walls", an one year long collaboration with a Syrian who fled to Saxony and a German who fled from the GDR, where we searched for analogies between the present day and historic events. My work brings different perceptions, lines of vision and attributions face to face with one another. In the first part of the project series, I let each of the two protagonists tell the story of the other, in order to examine questions of representation and identification. Mass media images selected by the refugees are used symbolically to illustrate the reports.
This dialogue has been presented in different spatial situations and has been developed on site. During the course of the three-part project, it has grown continually as further narrative elements were added.
Walking through walls is a „skill” that is more familiar to us from computer games. As the title of my project, it describes the situation of flight, a movement leading away from a threatening situation, often over borders, to a place assumed to be safe. This state of transit creates new life realities, mostly precarious, and becomes deeply engraved in the biographies of those who have taken flight.
Anna Witt, born in 1981 in Germany, lives and works in Vienna.
Working with performative intervention and video installation, her practice deals with the construction of cultural stereotypes and individuals positioning within social systems. Her works ambivalently sit between fictional re-enactment and documentary staging and represent the problematic of subject-formation in relation to identity politics, collectivity and citizenships rights.
Recently her work had been shown at Kunsthalle Bratislava; 1. Vienna Biennale MAK; GfZK Leipzig; Austrian Cultural Forum New York and at MOCA Museum of Contemporary Art Taipei and she had solo exhibitions at Kunst Halle Sant Gallen in 2016; Galerie Tanja Wagner, Berlin and at Stacion - Center for Contemporary Art, Prishtina, in 2014. She took part in Emscherkunst 13; Lux/ICA Biennial of Moving Images, London; 6. Berlin Biennale für zeitgenössische Kunst and Manifesta 7 in Rovereto and is the winner of Kunstpreis Zukunft Europa in 2015 and BC21 Art Award in 2013.