Angela Anderson. Ecosexual Time and the Subversive Multiplicity

The Cathrin Pichler Prize, funded by the City of Vienna with 2,500 euros, has been awarded by the Academy of Fine Arts Vienna since 2017 in memory of the thinker, curator and author Cathrin Pichler. The awardees are students or graduates of the University who think specifically about artistic methods and practices as a contribution and intervention to a scientific discourse.

The works of the US-American artist Angela Anderson focus on investigations of social crisis phenomena against the background of feminist and capitalist-critical theoretical approaches. Much of her work revolves around the devastating effects of large scale projects that plunder natural resources and the complex economic, social, historical, aesthetic, and psychological forces that interact within them. Her work challenges heteronormative capitalist economies in the face of global man-made crises, taking the ethical position of feminist eco-intersectionality to undermine patriarchal and colonialist narratives and invoke comprehensive solidarity – including towards nonhuman life forms.

Through experimenting with audiovisual media, her work strategy is to create maps of plural temporalities. Contrary to the flat, linear, capitalist understanding of time, she emphasises the diversity of terrestrial life forms – perceived as different temporalities – which coexist at any given moment and continue to develop together on various levels.

Alongside her three-channel video installation Three and More Ecologies the artist presents her new piece Ecosexual Time and the Subversive Multiplicity, which won the Cathrin Pichler Prize in 2020. The audiovisual lecture is based on Anderson’s explorations of the clash between “work” and “nature”. Through the aesthetic encounter of duration and multiplicity, she offers a conscious counterpoint to our current, increasingly accelerated experience of the world.