Artist Statement CHS - ANNIE KING
From Dust We Came and Dust We Shall Be (2020) is a long-term and open-ended project that has been informed by vast bodies of scientific, philosophical, academic and cultural research. With such an interdisciplinary approach the project sits in a constant state of flux between a reflection of, and a reaction to the research material.
Annie King is a British artist working with and against the photographic medium. Informed by vast bodies of scientific, philosophical, academic and cultural research, her practice focuses on the duality of absence-presence. The narratives that flow through her projects are intertwined and guided by extensive bodies of evolving research. This interdisciplinary approach allows Annie to embark upon long-term, open-ended projects that often sit in a constant state of flux between a reflection of and a reaction to the research material. Through the unification of image and text, Annie fabricates character driven narratives that explore the human condition or comment upon society at large. Her key influences include: Duane Michals’ photographic sequences, the timeless narratives of Italio Calvino, the integration of image and prose in the works of W.G Sebald and Ilya Kabakov’s character creation.
Annie’s latest project began with a written investigation into the art of participation and its long standing alliance with anti-establishment and anti-art movements. The research grew towards a close reading of The Society of the Spectacle by Guy Debord (1967) and ultimately prompted the question, what does spectacle look like today? Surveillance technologies capture our faces, our bodies, what we like to wear and what we like to think. Collectively, this information is termed big-data and consists of data points that can be used to predict an individual’s behaviour - this is the latest currency of capitalism. Spectacle has transitioned beyond the image and into the machine that reads the image. In response the artist has constructed a series of masks that rest upon the vast history of spiritual and physical protection aligned with covering the face. The mask represents protection from the pacifying spectacles of capitalism and the grand narrative of consumption. Using 3D technologies, the artist created a virtual imprint of each mask. This process is considered a digital upgrade yet it is a low-resolution visual downgrade for the human spectator. Opening the virtual copy file in a text programme reveals the machine language: computer code, bits, pixels, symbols, letters and numerical commands. Printed on large sheets of paper the colossal length of the code is exposed, it creates patterns that the eye can read but the true content and purpose of the data remains illegible. At the heart of image-making today sits a dichotomy between the image’s physical presence and its digital absence, the machine language of the 3-dimensional scan exposes this contradiction.
Since the opportunity arose to study at the Academy of Fine Arts in Vienna last year, Annie has developed an inquisitiveness towards the photographic image as art-object. High-quality and affordable image making technologies have intertwined with sophisticated systems of information dissemination over the last twenty years. Both the physical and digital landscapes we exist alongside are saturated, dripping and oozing with visual content. The image has become hyper-normalised by our consumer driven economy. These observances drive Annie to challenge the boundaries of the photographic medium and seek new ways of viewing. In removing images from their traditional white-cube-white-wall context, embracing 3D technologies or even producing no photographs at all, Annie seeks new ways to present, contextualise and homogenize her image-based and written practices.