Anna Spanlang: Chewing the phone/archive
Screening and talk by Anna Spanlang with Constanze Ruhm as part of the lecture series at the Institute of Fine Arts, organized by the studio for Art and Time | Media. Moderator: Constanze Ruhm
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)
Anna Spanlang was born in 1988 in Grieskirchen, Austria, and lives in Vienna. She studied video and video installation with Dorit Margreiter as well as art and digital media with Constanze Ruhm ot the Academy of Fine Arts Vienna and at CENART in Mexico City. She is the author of the 2023 Diagonale Trailer. In 2021 she received the Kunsthalle Wien Prize, and in 2022 she won the Diagonale Prize for Innovative Cinema from the City of Graz. Her recent exhibitions include AIR’23 at Galerie KRINZINGER SCHOTTENFELD in 2024; Anna Spanlang: Baby better have my menstruation. I ain't no museum at Kunsthaus Graz in 2023; LOVING OTHERS – Models of collaboration at Künstlerhaus Wien 2022 and Handspells: Kunsthalle Wien Prize 2021 at the Kunsthalle Wien in Vienna in 2022.