AiRArtist in Residence

Chretzeturm

Grasping, Placing, Laying

These activities are inscribed in Ana Strika’s natural or reused objects, but above all there is also constellating, modeling and transforming. The artist is a very attentive observer of everyday things and the circumstances to which they are bound. She has a great interest in plain materials, such as delicate branches, pieces of cardboard, scraps of paper, wooden blocks, ropes, wire mesh, textiles, molded plasticine, polymer clay, modeling compound, or plaster, which she encounters in her surroundings, collects and then lends a peculiar character in her installations. These materials can be understood in the sense of a mutual commentary: For example, she used silhouette-like staffages of related forms, different scaling of the size of objects or positive/negative forms.

The works of Ana Strika are based on performative concepts whose realization she explores in various media. The concept of the «performative» was introduced by the British philosopher of language, John L. Austin, in his lecture series How to Do Things with Words held at Harvard University in 1955. «You are more than entitled not to know what the word ‹performative› means. It is a new word and an ugly word, and perhaps it does not mean anything very much,»¹ he stated. But the conceptualization of the verb «to perform» in the sense of «the performing of an action»² went on to have unforeseen consequences for a performative turn in art as well.³

Collecting, Sorting, Categorizing

The Zurich-based artist understands the individual components of her installations as part of an «experimental pool, like a storeroom of props or a museum depot» from which she repeatedly brings individual objects to the stage of our attention. The principle of the «pool» from which the artist draws has to do with the processes of collecting, sorting and also categorizing. Ana Strika is constantly engaged with this in her practice, be it when collecting references in the history of making objects, when arranging display windows or when engaged in everyday activities like bundling waste paper for disposal. She traces the formal vocabulary inscribed in these contexts, condensing it to her own artistic language.

The artist implements her conceptual ideas in a physical arrangement by first drawing on paper. She finds this medium in her work process particularly appealing because the things do not yet have a concrete material. Via the intermediate step of the model, her drawings then become three-dimensional. She continuously photographs the result so as to question it time and again through new arrangements and material experiments. She therefore understands her work as an ongoing, cyclical process in which the artist does not necessarily works toward a final state. The aesthetic approach of Ana Strika is thus quintessentially characterized by performativity, in which different actions come into play and inscribe themselves in the work.

Modelingm Constelating, Transforming

Installations are aesthetically organized spaces. They are artworks operating at the thresholds or between different states. The subtle transitions between the physical, aesthetically organized space that constitutes an installation and the moving, perceiving and reflecting viewers are of critical importance.

Once Ana Strika has developed her «spatial drawings» as installations, we, as viewers, are led into imaginary showrooms. She modeled her most recent work, Kreisen (2023), which the artist installed in the Kulturhaus Obere Stube, using cut cardboard, delicate branches, prepared textiles and a large number of other objects. They were constellated in the exhibition space in a precise and site-specific way, all the way up to the historical beams.

Installations such as these temporarily occupy a place in the room like sketches and function in the manner of a modular and expandable construction kit that requires our imaginative effort. In the process of viewing, partially abstract, formal materials become concrete as new, more specific figurations. Memories of related forms drive our own mental cinema and draw it into a play with the visual vocabulary of Ana Strika’s world of changing images and shapes. Through our gaze and our movements through the installation, we are involved in the creation of the artwork, as it were. Our sensual perception is mobilized by the works that inscribe themselves in the space via the walls, the floor and the ceiling. Each of our movements transforms the perception of the expansive artworks. The corporeally perceiving co-presence of the visitors in the space thus becomes an essential part of the arrangement, in which the viewers are actually incorporated in the artistic-processual material actions of the work.

A... as in to actualize—in the case of the process-oriented approach of Ana Strika, this mainly requires courage! A... can also stand for articulating or alluding. The artist offers the viewers numerous possibilities to immerse in her aesthetic practices. In her works, we therefore find further procedures, such as moving, presenting, replacing, manipulating, concealing, or also reusing. The notion of reusing that emerges in the materials she prefers seems particularly relevant as a working method—especially in our times, in which ecological debates on our handling of resources must urgently be held and in which art, too, can raise its voice with the material it chooses. This artistic approach can be called a con-temporary one in the true sense of the word, that is, a working method that goes with the times.

Ana Strika was Artist in Residence at the Chretzeturm of the Jakob and Emma Windler Foundation from January to March 2023.

Text: Julia Wolf (translated by Karl Hoffmann)
Photos: Roberta Fele

1. John L. Austin: «Performative Utterances,» in: same: Philosophical Papers. Oxford: Oxford University Press, second edition (1970), p. 233.
2. John L. Austin: How to do things with Words. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1975, p.6.
3. See Erika Fischer-Lichte: Ästhetik des Performativen. Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 2004; Dorothea von Hantelmann: How to do things with art. Zur Bedeutsamkeit der Performativität von Kunst. Zürich: Diaphanes, 2007; Marita Tatari: Kunstwerk als Handlung. Transformationen von Ausstellung und Teilnahme. Paderborn: Wilhelm Fink, 2017.