Anna Spanlang: Chewing the phone/archive


21/03/2024, 18-20 h

 II12, Mehrzwecksaal-Audio u. Videostudio IBK (LG0212), Semperdepot, Léhargasse 6-8, 1060 Wien

Screening and talk by Anna Spanlang with Constanze Ruhm as part of the lecture series at the Institute of Fine Arts, organized by the department Art and Time | Media

Anna Spanlang’s works seek to limn a poetics of the ordinary while underscoring the political dimension of an everyday life in which community, friendship, and feminism are actually lived and not just discussed. (Anne Faucheret)

Anna Spanlang's working method is one of processual documentation over a long period of time: sifting through the most disparate video recordings, discarding them, assembling them, reconsidering them, taking them apart. Through her feminist montage, the artist creates (new) meaning. She thus explores the strengths of her found material and enters into a new relationship of trust with the images. In rearranging and reinterpreting everyday situations, she creates a specific space for play. Spanlang's videos about feminist solidarity always create a real, utopian counternarrative to the history of patriarchy and all that it stands for - colonialism, capitalism, environmental destruction, violence. The motifs range from demonstrations against femicide and women posing on cars to a sculpture of a giant used tampon. One thing is clear: the patriarchy must go. Abolishing it may still take some time, but until then another world remains possible in Spanlang's imagery, a world of communality in which friendship, but also artistic creation and self-actualization, take center stage. (Christiane Erharter)