Anna Irina Russell
Short stay residency
February - April 2018
Anna Irina Russell. Barcelona, 1993
Her artistic practice is based on leisure as a tool for research and approach to the immediate environment. She works from the creation of absurd situations in order to decode the established psychological and social constructions. She is interested in dynamiting the relationships between body, space and object from the disconcerting and unusual, using interfaces as a space for interaction. She’s attracted by error, failure, accident, noise and distortion, as it accentuates the way in which we understand ‘reality’. She has recently been working on the potential of sound and its persuasive effect, and how it affects the perception of the environment. When the appearance of what is used to represent an object, whether tangible or intangible, is closer to the object represented than the original, an idea that starts from the analysis of Foley as a case of an approach to reality, where what we hear does not really provide what we see in order to give more credibility to each situation. There is a dissociation of the sounds and their sources, where the generated sound does not coincide with the object that generates it.
Both in the action / performance or in the interactive installations with which they work, they have a real-time and alive component that understands the public not as an object but as an essential subject that becomes a part of the action. The uncertainty and improvisation of the moment makes it possible to break down, mutate and adapt to the reactions produced to the proposals put forward. Although it often uses installation, action and video, its practice is deployed in various formats, taking into account the context of each project. She currently works as a freelance hairdresser, also working as a platform for the dissemination of artistic events.
Graduated in Fine Arts from the University of Barcelona, where she is in the process of research and production of the final project of the Sound Art Master Degree. She has been one of the artists resident in Fabra i Coats (2017/18) and has participated in several residences such as REITIR (Iceland) and Sketch’m Up (Marseille), always in collaborative and multidisciplinary projects. She is part of the Bacanal del Sâlmon Festival (2018), as well as he recently participated in Seismes (Fabra i Coats), in the cycle of Art Nou in La Escocesa (Bcn) and in Embarrat_17 (Tàrrega). He has also shown his work in collective exhibitions in Sala Usurpada (Bcn), Convent de San Agustí (Bcn), Nau Estruch (Sabadell), Alþýðuhúsið, Reitir (Iceland).
