Polina: Anna
Have you ever noticed how little sky you can see in Vienna when you look up? All you see is a small fragment, with everything else blocked by buildings. You start to feel like an ant, trapped in narrow concrete corridors – although sometimes they can be quite beautiful.
In one of these buildings in Margareten lies the studio where Anna works. The 5th district often gives me a sense of a time I couldn't have experienced – something from the 80s, simple yet sticky, as if from Fassbinder’s films with a touch of the Habsburgs.
I wonder what the place where I grew up is made of. Something dusty and cold, industrial, from the 90s and without the grandeur of the Habsburgs. But with a wide-open sky.
How real are those memories tho?
Anna’s studio building reminded me of an office, but more alive. Young voices and laughter echoed from other rooms, music played somewhere, keyboards blinked away. Above Anna’s desk hung photographs of that same cropped sky, taken by her. A sky always separated from us by buildings and fences, never letting us breathe freely – only teasing through wires. She showed me her other works – photographs that run parallel to long papyruses with poetry and texts about something deeply personal yet relatable. About laziness, love, closeness, and distance. Things that are always present yet so easily ignored. Poetics of the everyday.
How ironic that usually I feel almost powerless when it comes to words, and now I have to write about someone who juggles them so effortlessly.
I wanted to write about how, in Anna’s works, words take shape and exist in a multi-dimensional space, creating a bridge between the visual and the verbal. How the texts themselves, through their appearance and structure, create an image; how the structures of text and image intertwine, and so on and so forth. But I think I shouldn’t do it. These descriptions won’t bring us any closer to understanding or feeling Anna’s works, but will just fill this text with water. Words like that often brutally rationalise artworks and destroy what they are really about. Anna’s works need delicacy.
I can only tell how I felt about them. For me personally, they are very sincere and touching. There was something childishly light about them but at the same time something very melancholic.
I think an important key to my perception lies in the fact that I had the chance to get to know Anna more closely and even try her mom’s cookies. It made me think of my mom. And distance. And how little sky you can see when you look up.
von Polina Sokolova / Künstlerin, Malerin
/ im Jänner 2025