Daily Lazy: Anna Witt at Belvedere 21 / Vienna, Austria

Anna Witt / Human Flag

Curated by Luisa Ziaja

28 February - 27 May 2018

Belvedere 21
Arsenalstraße 1
1030 Vienna, Austria

Anna Witt, Flexitime, 2010, Video installation, 3-channel HD video, color, audio, 20 min.

Anna Witt, Beat Body, 2016-18, Video installation, Multichannel HD video, color, audio, c. 5 Min each.

Anna Witt, Under the Pavement, 2016, 12-part photo-text series, Fine-Art Inkjet print, Dimension varies

Anna Witt, Body in Progress, 2018, Video installation, 5-channel 4K video, color, audio

Installation view, Anna Witt, Human Flag, Belvedere 21

Anna Witt, Body in Progress, 2018, Video installation, 5-channel 4K video, color, audio

Anna Witt’s artistic practice is performative, participatory, and political. She creates situations that reflect interpersonal relationships and power structures as well as conventions of speaking and acting. The Belvedere 21 is showing her first solo exhibition at a Viennese institution. It consists of three video installations along with photographs and texts that shine a light on various aspects of our ideas around “work.”

“The art of Anna Witt stands out for presenting thematic focal points regarding how we live together; it is a practice in which social, political, and economic parameters are reflected in ways that enable them to be experienced and debated. In the context of “Spirit of 68,” this year’s program motto at the Belvedere 21, which is dedicated to the relevance of the social struggles and achievements of the sixties movement in the present day, these observations on the relationship of subject, work, and society appear to have a special importance,” says Stella Rollig, General Director of the Belvedere and Belvedere 21.

Anna Witt involves passersby in public spaces, or specifically selected people and groups, into her performative experimental arrangements, usually in a directly physical way. This forms the basis for her video installations. The tasks range from repeated imitation of specifically coded gestures to the development of complex choreographies, and give the participants opportunities for individual articulation and authorship. With curiosity and empathy for her counterpart, Anna Witt explores the borders between the self and the other and tries to activate the individual’s capacity for action, which she understands as a prerequisite for community and society.

The artist describes her basic method as follows: “I make a space of action available to people, which they can organize themselves. Verbal and non-verbal articulations then open up spaces where our way of living together can be thought through and redefined.”

In recent years, Anna Witt has realized a whole series of artistic projects on the relationship between the individual, work, and society. These projects enable us to experience current forms of subjectivization that are part of daily life and therefore often invisible. How do we become who we are? What do we do, what do we believe in, what do we fight for? And how is this social self connected to visible and invisible mechanisms, norms and rules of our society? Anna Witt’s first solo exhibition at a Viennese institution consists of three video installations along with photographs and text. In addition to the 3-channel video installation Flexitime (2010), the work Beat Body (2016-18) is being shown for the first time in a version composed of four video sculptures. These are supplemented and contextualized by the photo/text work Under the Pavement (2016). On the occasion of this exhibition, Anna Witt produced the 5-channel video essay Body in Progress (2018) in the adjacent urban-development area around the new Vienna Central Station.

“In the exhibition at Belvedere 21 Anna Witt both illuminates the mechanisms of ascribing value and social position to certain professions, as well as the meaning of historical gestures and symbols of collective organized labor in times of radical individualization. And she explores possible utopias where the concept of work and life differs from our cycle of constant commitment and self-optimization,”explains Curator Luisa Ziaja. “Her approach to given conditions is neither naive nor cynical. Instead, she tries to elicit small adjustments to our perception and our actions that open up perspectives for community beyond the dominant social patterns.”

Detailed information on the works shown at the exhibition

Flexitime, 2010
Video installation
3-channel HD video, color, audio, 20 min.

Anna Witt invited passersby in industrial and office zones in Vienna to take part in her video for a token fee. Their task was to pose in front of the camera with a raised fist, a gesture which historically belongs to the workers’ movement. The protagonists were allowed to decide for themselves how long they held the pose, thus determining the length of the individual shots. By deciding on the time themselves, the participants were led into a certain responsibility as well as the moral dilemma of assessing how much time was appropriate to do justice to the demands of the task – a dilemma that is also found in modern, deregulated models of working time.

Beat Body, 2016-18
Video installation
Multichannel HD video, color, audio, c. 5 Min each.

With Beat Body, Anna Witt has created a performative monument for the sex workers on Kurfürstenstraße in Berlin. She spent some time in the women's environment and asked for permission to record their heartbeats. Everyone has their own individual heartbeat, which creates a portrait that is both very intimate and anonymous at the same time. The personal soundtrack of each woman’s heartbeat was transformed into individual choreographies by professional pole dancers from a nearby nightclub. Through the strong self-determined physicality of the dancers, the video sculpture Beat Body becomes a tribute to the women of the street and emphasizes the value of each individual human being. Beat Body is being shown as an installation of four video sculptures for the first time in this exhibition.

Under the Pavement, 2016
12-part photo-text series
Fine-Art Inkjet print, Dimension varies

The photo-text series Under the Pavement documents the encounters and collaboration with the sex workers while the video installation Beat Body was being created.

Body in Progress, 2018
Video installation
5-channel 4K video, color, audio

The video installation Body in Progress, produced for this exhibition, was made in the urban-development area around Vienna Central Station and the Quartier Belvedere. Anna Witt engages with ways of imagining an optimized world of work and life. Here they are conceptualized through an analogy between work and work-out. In a 5-channel video, panoramas and details of the work environment in the area’s hotels, construction sites, and Erste Campus offices, are interwoven with shots of athletic interventions into a fragmentary whole. Anna Witt asked a group of calisthenics athletes to use the buildings and work areas for their bodyweight exercises. The relatively new extreme-lifestyle sport of calisthenics is about free body training, which largely eschews fitness machines and can be performed anywhere, at any time. One of the most popular and challenging Calisthenics moves is the “human flag,” in which the extended body is stretched out horizontally from a pole. Characteristics such as commitment, individuality, freedom from rules, and self-optimization – attributes of our contemporary working world – are symbolically transferred to the body. There is also textual content, based on the artist’s conversations with working people on site, which explores their experiences with work as a power factor and what they understand that to mean, as well as utopias and reflections on the network of relationships between the individual, work, and society.

*Photo: Johannes Stoll. Courtesy Anna Witt, Vienna and Galerie Tanja Wagner, Berlin