ANNA BAUMGART
born: 1966, Wroclaw
1994: graduated from the Gdańsk Academy of Fine Arts
1995: Gdańsk City Mayor’s Award for the Most Interesting Debut
2011: Prize for the Best Video (presentation of LOKAL_30 at LOOP Barcelona)
Video artist, author of performative actions, installations, sculptures and theatre set design, remarkably perceptive to the unstated, traumatic, repressed and unsettled. Already her first videos from the early 90s, tackling the themes of gender and feminism, demonstrate exceptional social sensitivity. Come the next decade, her works gain formal elaboration, displaying increased awareness of the medium. Still, Baumgart pursues critical reflection on the human and social condition, progressively addressing historic and cultural memory. Hence, a cycle of press photograph-inspired figurative sculptures, ephemeral installation of an ellipsis levitating in the historic Warsaw ghetto, or her latest video Fresh Cherries. Against the variety of artistic activities, Baumgart’s practice is centred on social reality, its experience and impact on the individual.
BIO
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fragments of the text by Bill Kouwenhoven
The Uncanny and the Hypothetical in the Work of Anna Baumgart
(…) With her earliest works such as Let Unrestrained Anger Be Eliminated (1996), she incorporated electrical and optic devices and various liquids that merged representations of the body with the implements of technology in a staged battle between “the female” and “the male.” Later videos: Who Speaks? (1998), Mother (1999), Condoms, Money, Lady - No problem! (1999), and True? (2001), continue her strategies of feminist representation and the questioning of societal roles and emotional relationships. In the latter video series, Baumgart inserted herself into contemporary Polish films such as (Leca Zurawie by Michail Kalatozow and Mis by Stanislaw Bareja) in order to critique media images of women in society.
Baumgart’s concern with the status of women in society and the (self-)representation of women is a major feature of Ecstatics, Hysterics and Other Saintly Ladies, (2004), a video that was presented as part of a body of work, A Collection of Shameful Gestures, in collaboration with Birgit Brenner at the Zacheta National Gallery of Art in Warsaw She examines issues of female auto-aggression and hysteria, and notes in an interview that she was “tempted by the possibility of redefining the notion of ‘hysteria’: of transforming it from a verbal insult into a verbal compliment. The hysteric seems interesting to me, suggesting a creative approach by women to the world, a defiant and even revolutionary attitude. What feminism has already uncovered and investigated on the basis of 19th century hysteria – that it is a kind of auto-art – has never found acceptance in our collective thinking”. (Kolekcja wstydliwych gestów…, in: Czas Kultury, no. 1, 2004, www.culture.pl).
This inquiry has led directly into some of her most vibrant works, notably Weronika (2006) and Natascha (2006). Baummgart uses media images of women as the basis for these sculptures. Weronika takes as its subject an image of a woman, her face bandaged and in shock after the terrorist attacks in the London transportation system. The photograph became one of the main images that were fixed in the public mind as the true face of the horror of the attacks. The title of this sculpture, Weronika, takes its name from Saint Veronica who is said to have offered Jesus a cloth to wipe the sweat and tears off his face en route to his crucifixion. The cloth was miraculously imprinted with his image and thus became „the true image,” or „Vera Eikon.” Baumgart’s sculpture features an exaggerated bandage on her face, clothed, and painted to resemble the newspaper photo. However, Baumgart has painted only the frontal side of the woman and left white the sides of the woman not captured in the two-dimensional image seen by millions of viewers. Through this act of subversion, Baumgart alerts us to the fact that there is more going on „behind the scene” and that there is a backstory that must remain unknown to us. Thus, there is no „Vera Eikon” and we can never know what really happened.(..)
full text at LOKALNA_NEW_**ENGLISH_texts
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fragment of the text by Katarzyna Bojarska
Responsibility for the Story
In the video Fresh Cherries (2010), produced in the frame of the project Falstad Kunst in Norway, Anna Baumgart tackles some pivotal questions related to dealing with traumatic past and pursues a critical reflection of the contemporary “division of sensuality”, both in the field of art and science. The artist lays bare the fact that being a woman at war is nothing neutral, and the memory of it – a game with a lot at stake. The video Fresh Cherries focuses on the problem of forced prostitution in Nazi concentration camps and sexual abuse of women at war. It is not a reconstruction, nor a re-enactment, although Baumgart plays (sneaky) with the canon in a very clever way. It is not a documentary, nor TV theatre, though the work derives some of its components from both of these genres. It is multilayered story of several female (and male) characters, which interlaces various threads from the past and the present. Being a bit perverse, one might regard this video as a continuation of the artist’s projects from the 1990s, such as A Small Collection of Makeshift Epitaphs, Who Speaks?, When She Kissed a Frog, Mothers or Condom, Money, Lady – No Problem – as a perverse “film about love” made by a “well trained girl”.
It must be stressed that the video Fresh Cherries does not concern the past as much as it tackles the question: why today (still, or actually only today) do we have to deal with the past – as women, researchers, artists? One of the immediate answers that Baumgart’s work elicits pertains to the fact that this duty, even though unwanted, is related above all to the responsibility for the future – the future when history will be taught with no need for omissions to keep spirits high and the collective awareness intact. (…)
full text at LOKALNA_NEW ** ENGLISH_texts
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texts:
at LOKALNA_NEW_**TEXTS_Anna Baumgart (ENG)
text on Hypothesis of the Stolen Image by Bill Kouwehoven
text on Chinese Whispers by Arron Schuster
text on Fresh Cherries by Katarzyna Bojarska
/www.polishculture-nyc.org/index.cfm?itemcategory=30817&personDetailId=81
http://www.jewishmuseum.org.pl/en/cms/project-/
//www.facebook.com/note.php?note_id=147660661962964
http://v13.videonale.org/en/artist/476-baumgart-anna
PL________
Urodzona w 1966 roku we Wrocławiu, mieszka w Warszawie
Zajmuje się video, instalacją, rzeźbą.
Brała udział w wielu wystawach w kraju i zagranicą m.in.: Brooklyn Museum of Art (2007), NKB w Berlinie (2007), Museum on the Seam w Izraelu (2008), Casino Luksemburg w Luksemburgu (2008).
Miala wystawy indywidualne m.in. w Galerii Zachęta, w Warszawie. Od 2005 roku współpracuje z galerią LOKAL_30 w Warszawie.
Autorka prac wideo z cyklu video Prawdziwe? Lecą żurawie. (2001) w których zastępuje wizerunek aktorki wmontowując swoją postać w kadry filmów fabularnych. Tematykę społecznych klisz politycznego dyskursu podejmuje również w powstałych po 2002 realistycznych rzeźbach - Bombowniczka (2004). Wojownik (2005), w których artystka zaskakująco zderza wizerunki, symbole, atrybuty, maski. W rzeźbiach powstałym wg fotografii prasowej: Weronika AP (2006) i Natasha (2007), zwraca się ku tematowi prywatności jednostki wobec publicznego wizerunku medialnego. Baumgart tworzy w procesie wyboru fotografii, fragmentyzacji i realizacji rzeźb powstałych na tej podstawie. Dodając trzeci wymiar do wizerunku od-fotograficznego Mur (2008), Dziewczynka (Bresson) 2008) lokuje go w odmiennej przestrzeni interpretacyjnej i znaczeniowej. Podbijając strategie przenikania się mediów, miesza ikonografie i symbole, skalę i źrodła do swoich realizacji, fotografię z rzeźbą, beton i nowoczesnymi żywicami. Najnowszy projekt pt: Hipoteza skradzionego obrazu (2008) dotyczy zawłaszczonych wizerunków odmiennych narracji, które wymykając się z pod kontroli autorów, “wizytują” się wzajemnie tworząc hipotetycznie nowy, subwersywny i hybrydalny byt nieistniejącego obrazu. (…)
fragment tekstu
Bill Kouwenhoven
London, 17 October 2008
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