_{Image courtesy of Anna Berry}

Interview: Anna Berry

 

Luca Curci talks with Anna Berry during VENICE INTERNATIONAL EXPERIMENTAL | OUT OF BORDERS.

Anna Berry creates site-specific installation pieces, often with paper, as well as working with photography. She has exhibited at galleries such as The Royal West of England Academy and The Strand Gallery, London. In 2013, she was shortlisted for ‘Open Cube’ at White Cube in London, and has recently completed residencies in Brush Creek, Wyoming and Fljotstunga, Iceland. 

 

_{Image courtesy of Anna Berry}

 

Anna’s work tends to be concerned with the way our cognition shapes reality, and hence how the nature of reality differs from what we perceive. The nature of her disability means she quite literally inhabits a parallel world to the rest of humanity; hence she likes to draw attention to how our minds impose categories upon a chaos and create the world as we know it. As well as undermining the fabric of reality, she is also often toying with arbitrary cultural notions like gender, race, nationality, and religion. She works in many media, but recently often with paper interventions. They are fragile and ephemeral, and rely on photographic recording. The practice of making them verges on the performative because of the often-absurd difficulty of placing the paper in the environment given the conditions, and because of the very repetitive nature of the making. Anna has a background in commercial photography. She exists in Milton Keynes.

 

_{Image courtesy of Anna Berry}

 

Luca Curci – What do you think about the concept of VENICE INTERNATIONAL EXPERIMENTAL | OUT OF BORDERS? In which way did inspire you?

Anna Berry – As a relative art outsider, I was attracted to a call for art that lies in a more experimental sphere. My work doesn’t quite seem to fit into art world conventions, so somewhere that calls for the openness to be experimental is more suited to me.

 

L.C. – Please tell me about your art/the artwork shown during our event.

A.B. – I’m showing pictures of paper interventions I install around the town where I live, Milton Keynes, in the UK.

 

_{Image courtesy of Anna Berry}

 

L.C. – Are your artworks focused on a specific theme?

A.B. – I have a very wide scope as to the ideas I like to explore with my art (that seems to be one of the things that ‘The Art World’ doesn’t like about me!). If there is a common strand is that I always come back to, it’s how reality is a movable feast, and is really a narrative created by our cognitive processes.

 

_{Image courtesy of Anna Berry}

 

L.C. – Did you style change over the years? How?

A.B. – My background was actually in photography, so my practise evolved from photography, to installation and intervention, and then to performance, when I realised that the process of creating the installations was as much a part of the piece as the finished installation. I realise now that my practise inhabits a kind of hinterland between installation, performance, and photographic record.

 

L.C. – Are you interested in future collaborations with our organisation?

A.B. – I am always interested in collaboration!

 

_{Image courtesy of Anna Berry}

 

 

_{Image courtesy of Anna Berry}

 

 

_{Image courtesy of Anna Berry}