SELECTED WORK | video
Erdemojies - Forscherinnen der Mischung | 2024
Erdemojies - Forscherinnen der Mischung linear version of the 3 channel video
In her 3-channel video installation Erdemojies – Forscher*innen der Mischung, Steinert brings in reinforcements: The performers and fellow artists Monika Michalko, Nschotschi Haslinger, Cora Saller, Katharina Duve, Hanna Matthes, Helena Ratka, Sophie Labrey and Helena Wittmann (camera) appear as naturalists, healers and superheroes who, in an experimental and playful approach, accompanied by darkly wavering electro sounds and drums, summon nature and elemental forces with the common aim of setting healthy structures in motion for all living beings.
Their performative gestures remind of ceremonial rites; with their fine branches, roots and hairs, the masks that Steinert has formed from organic material are reminiscent of sensual antennas. As terrestrial beings of fable and otherworldly creatures of art, the artists appear both staged as a tableau vivant and as active individual performers – yet always as part of a collective entity in which all is interconnected, inextricably interwoven, influencing each other and completely dissolving hierarchies between nature, humans, arts and culture.
text excerpt from “Was am tiefsten in der Welt liegt”, Miriam Schwarz
Das verlorene Gesicht | 2019
Das verlorene Gesicht, Experimentalfilm by Anna Steinert, Sound by Nika Son, 11:45min, black&white, 16mm compositing, 2019
Das verlorene Gesicht (engl. The lost face)
The film shows 16mm handheld camera shots in black and white, which were shot as a kind of sketchbook, mostly documentary, partly staged and with a film trick at the end of the film, in the bush-burning car city of Los Angeles and the surrounding area.
The film opens with a shot across the Pacific Ocean from Malibu, the sea shrouded in luminous fog that moves from the bushfires in the hills around LA, which get worse every year, to across the ocean. This is followed by snapshots that move between observations of the city and the landscape; A burnt-down shack and shopping cart where a homeless family used to live, a balloon heart dancing in the sun reflected on a child’s grave, a burnt-down patch of forest in a residential neighborhood in the hills outside LA, an absurd stand-up man entertaining a car dealership in the desert, under a bridge looking into the face of Kaleb, a homeless man camped out between the passing cars, the disused Mount Wilson Observatory in the mountains above LA, “signs of the stars” in the city, from Astroburger to the esoteric store.
The atmosphere conveys an uneasy feeling, disaster is present, the signs are bad. The impressions are accompanied by the motif of a young woman with indigenous roots who repeatedly appears as a silent observer and finds herself in a bizarre Californian landscape.
The images intensify until, at the end of the film, the film and the landscape through which the young woman wanders burn down completely.
The film is carried by an intense electronic-experimental sound and manages without language.
“The Lost Face” deals with disappearance on various levels. On the one hand, that of the analog, on the other, it refers to the relationship between man and nature in associative snapshots and bids farewell to an era of the American Dream.
The lousy Curtains | 2018
The Lousy Curtains | 2018 | 7:45 min
The video “The lousy Curtains” was created during a residency in Brussels, where I made masks with materials I found at a flea market not far from my studio there.
The location for the performative video was my studio, which was particularly characterized by the fact that it was a store on a very busy street.
The team for the video was made up of a musician, an artist and a cameraman from Brussels, all of whom I met on site.
The idea for the video is based on the poem “The Panther” by R.M. Rilke.
In the video “The lousy Curtains”, the artist in the studio ironically becomes the panther in his cage.
Besuch einer Vorstellung | 2016
Besuch einer Vorstellung | 2016 | 8:45
What Dreams May Come
“I have had a most rare vision. I have had a dream, past the wit of man to say what dream it was.”
– William Shakespeare, A Midsummer Night’s Dream
They stand there, shoulder to shoulder, jostling to get a better view, eager for it to be their turn, for the waiting to end. There are feathers and finery, embellishments and wigs, louche fans at once coy and sensual, waved by delicate wrists. We are presented by a sort of demented Versailles, a masked ball with all the finery of the court of the Sun King, laced with an air of expectation, desire and the gleefully unhinged.
These masks, which hide the faces of the cast in German artist Anna Steinert’s newest film work, Besuch einer Vorstellung (2016) – whether large and dramatic or simply painted on – draw on the artist’s enduring interest in the role of the mask and its ability to both hide and reveal. A mask is freeing – it allows its wearer to take on another persona, to both erase oneself and create oneself anew. Yet it is also a marker – its pattern and style can reveal where it was made, what period it belongs to and, sometimes, why it was worn. Steinert, however, takes all of these ideas and remixes them into a brand new lexicon – what we see is familiar, yet foreign. Indeed, the motif of the mask appears across not just her film works, but her paintings as well – the question of the authentic self is ever in flux.
As such, Steinert draws on a vast visual library of literary and cinematic influences when building her experimental films – from the tales of E.T.A. Hoffman to the movies of Jean Rouch and Maya Deren. She seamlessly melds visual cues into her own unique language, harking to the strong colour palettes and luscious tableaux of Peter Greenaway coupled with a more raw aesthetic that is at times Coney Island carnival, at others, brilliant freak show, a dash of Donnie Darko with a twist.
Like previous works before it, Besuch einer Vorstellung is an intriguing combination of masks, semi-surreal soundtrack and a sense of otherworldliness. There is an element of Shakespeare’s mischievous sprite Puck in the figure of the strange gatekeeper who initiates our gilded visitors into the performance they are queuing to see. In fact, rather like A Midsummer Night’s Dream, we are presented with a play within a play – we become aware that we, as an audience, are watching this audience watching… what? A witch, a magician, an alchemist, a sorcerer with magic potions – we can only dream of the Peyote-like visions that are about to be induced as the scene melds into fiery scenes of Bacchanalian celebration, tribal drumming and dancing around a totem pole.
Steinert’s free-form directing style is evident in the energy and spontaneity we see in these characters’ improvised ecstatic rituals, the rhythm building to a euphoric release, a feeling of transcendentalism. But there is tension too – where are they going, our revelers, and what sublime ecstasy is at their fingertips? We are suddenly aware of our place as the outsider, looking in. Then, as if awaking from a faraway dream, in the pale light of morning, we see the husks of the night before. Masks rotate softly in the air, empty sockets gazing back at us, eerie, haunting. What have these eyes seen?
Anna Wallace-Thompson
Mosagrima | 2013
Film by Anna Steinert | Sound Nika Son | Mosagrima | 2013 | black&white | 16mm, Full HD | 4:3 | 5 Minuten | Sound
Béla Balázs
from “The Visible Man” (1924)
Landscape is a physiognomy, a face that suddenly looks at us from a place in the region as if from the confusion of a picture puzzle.
A face of the region with a very specific, if indefinable, emotional expression, with a clear, if incomprehensible, meaning.
A face that seems to have a deep emotional relationship with man.
A face that means man.
