Finns mycket att roa sig med på det som heter Internet. Generera sin artistiska biografi till exempel. Bra att jag numera har en riktlinje för mina framtida alster. Om det nu var så att jag tvivlade. Gör din egen här!
Anna Mezey (°1980, Gothenbourg, Sweden) is an artist who works in a variety of media. By investigating language on a meta-level, Mezey creates work through labour-intensive processes which can be seen explicitly as a personal exorcism ritual. They are inspired by a nineteenth-century tradition of works, in which an ideal of ‘Fulfilled Absence’ was seen as the pinnacle. By referencing romanticism, grand-guignolesque black humour and symbolism, she tries to grasp language. Transformed into art, language becomes an ornament. At that moment, lots of ambiguities and indistinctnesses, which are inherent to the phenomenon, come to the surface.Her artworks are characterised by the use of everyday objects in an atmosphere of middleclass mentality in which recognition plays an important role. By contesting the division between the realm of memory and the realm of experience, she absorbs the tradition of remembrance art into daily practice. This personal follow-up and revival of a past tradition is important as an act of meditation.Mezey's works are often classified as part of the new romantic movement because of the desire for the local in the unfolding globalized world. However, this reference is not intentional, as this kind of art is part of the collective memory.Consequently her works demonstrate how life extends beyond its own subjective limits and often tells a story about the effects of global cultural interaction over the latter half of the twentieth century. It challenges the binaries we continually reconstruct between Self and Other, between our own ‘cannibal’ and ‘civilized’ selves. By taking daily life as subject matter while commenting on the everyday aesthetic of middle class values, her works references post-colonial theory as well as the avant-garde or the post-modern and the left-wing democratic movement as a form of resistance against the logic of the capitalist market system.Her artworks focus on the inability of communication which is used to visualise reality, the attempt of dialogue, the dissonance between form and content and the dysfunctions of language. In short, the lack of clear references are key elements in the work. The possible seems true and the truth exists, but it has many faces, as Hanna Arendt cites from Franz Kafka.
Anna Mezey currently lives and works in Paris.
