Anna Witt

Many people would describe art as a category of object production. For Anna Witt, art is a category of experience. Mostly performative, Witt’s work deals with subject formation: how each person becomes a social self. The Vienna-based artist captured this process in the video Die Geburt (The Birth, 2003) which was screened at the 6th Berlin Biennial in 2010. A woman lies on a bed in a room with wood panelling and an unmistakably alpine feeling; a strange lump bulges under her nightgown. ‘Are there two people or just one?’ the viewer may wonder until a naked yet fully-grown female rolls out from underneath the nightgown and crawls out of the frame. The video stars Witt and her mother whom the artist persuaded to reenact her birth in 1981 in Wasserburg am Inn, Germany. Art often flirts with the aesthetics of abjection, especially in the tradition of Viennese Actionism. Yet Witt avoids indulging in blood and faeces – no bodily fluids on view here – to tackle the psychoanalytic notion of abjection: separating from the mother to construct an identity.

In more than twenty performances captured on video, Witt has used bodies to explore the borders between self and other and to defy the codification of social roles and behaviours. Even the distinction between artist and art work gets blurred. As part of her installation Import-Export Life Conditions (2005–6), she started a dialogue with Santiago Sierra’s Línea de 160 cm tatuada sobre 4 personas (160 cm Line Tattooed on 4 People, 2000), for which Sierra recruited four drug-addicted prostitutes in Salamanca, Spain, and offered them the money for one heroin shot in exchange for having the line tattooed on their backs. Witt paid $400 in Mexico City to have a 160cm line tattooed on her own back. While questioning the ownership of the work, Witt’s appropriation turns into a cost-value comparison between her body and Sierra’s recruits.

Far from taking centre stage, Witt deploys performance to complicate the distinction between actor and spectator and to open up a space where people take ownership and responsibility for their actions. In her video installation Empower me! (2007), shown at the Triennale Linz 1.0 in 2010, the artist asks people on the street to voice their grievances and demands, only to take them hostage; bound and blindfolded, they are shown kneeing before Witt, clad in paramilitary garb, while their demands appear on a blackboard like so many school lessons. In the video Push (2006) – filmed at Venice Beach, California – Witt invites passers-by to play ‘law enforcers’ and force her head down on the hood of a car; then, the roles are switched, and it’s her turn to strong-arm them. Leading her subjects to play both oppressor and oppressed, Witt explores how behaviour is influenced by the situation rather than the disposition of the agents involved.

Her contribution to Manifesta 7 in Trentino in 2008 – Missing Counterparts (2008) – took role reversals into the realm of national identities. In a train station in Vienna, Witt set up a reproduction of a landscape wall painting which she found in Rovereto’s train station. Deploying the reproduction of the picturesque mountains as a stage set, the artist asked passers-by to recount their political woes on camera. Back in Rovereto, another batch of random participants were requested to interpret the facial expressions of the Viennese and articulate these demands in their own Italian context. National identities reappear in Auch wenn die Kost rein österreichisch ist, gibt sich die Küchenbelegschaft international (Even though the food is absolutely Austrian, the kitchen staff is international, 2008), screened at her solo shows at Lothringer13 Städtische Kunsthalle München in 2010 and at Magazin 4 Bregenzer Kunstverein in 2011. The title is a quote from an Austrian Armed Forces report on integration; in the two-channel video installation, Witt juxtaposes interviews with civilians and soldiers to confound the demands placed on minorities and immigrants, with the military principles of adaptation and subordination.

Witt’s most recent work Eye Witness (2011) is being exhibited through November at the Salzburger Kunstverein’s Kabinett and at Museum Goch. For this video installation – developed with Marco Ceroli – Witt asked children, aged 7 to 10, to interpret images released by the Reuters news agency about current political events. Confronted with these fragmentary sources, the children offer equally fragmentary interpretations, which mix their personal experiences with playful fictional elements. While the camera pans slowly over several details in the images, their information value is further degraded. It’s no wonder that Witt, whose work revolves around learnt behaviour, reached out to children. Eye Witness adds yet another dialectical pair – the objective and the subjective interpretation of media images – to the many polarities that Witt seeks to disrupt.