Video interests me only as a tool
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“Art and direct action—I think I see a way for them to productively complement each other.” – Anna Jermolaewa in her statement upon the announcement that she will be designing the show at the Austrian Pavilion for the 2024 Art Biennale in Venice. The artist, who was born in what is now St. Petersburg in 1970 and emigrated to Austria in 1989, has always combined activist subversion with an artistic oeuvre that itself draws on highly personal experiences of escape and travel, of the familiar and the foreign in highly varied ways.
RESEARCH FOR SLEEPING POSITIONS (2006), a video with which Jermolaewa is represented in the KONTAKT COLLECTION, exemplifies this in her characteristic blend of sharp analytic distinctions and laconic humor. Its filming location: the concourse at Vienna’s Westbahnhof, one of the Austrian capital’s main centers of arrival and departure by rail—a place that, by its very nature, is heavily frequented by people including refugees and immigrants of every stripe. The rolling video camera observes a young woman “testing” out one of the wooden benches installed by station management, perfidious constructions that actually consist of three separate chair-elements. One could put it this way: what is being tested here is a claim to the status of “wooden bench” manifested as a utilitarian design deliberately broken into small segments so as to prevent long-term sitting, to say nothing of repose or even sleep. Which is to say that this thing fails to perform its function as a “bench.” It most definitely does, however—as apparently intended by those who had it set up—serve a purpose by not inviting one to linger.
The young woman is Anna Jermolaewa herself. Dressed appropriately for the inhospitable conditions here in her hooded tracksuit and a winter coat, Jermolaewa attempts to figure out feasible seated and reclining postures that could somehow outfox this system of exclusion and its uninviting design. In this, RESEARCH FOR SLEEPING POSITIONS seems more like a recording of personally motivated field research. But at the same time and especially in light of its sheer rawness, it does seem something like a parody of “art” or even “performance in the public space,” where artists apply their worldviews in all kinds of virtuosic or at least demonstrative ways. In this case, the observer bears witness to a very concrete struggle for survival. Posture, position, framing, and motion: in Anna Jermolaewa’s scenario, these are not artistic parameters but rather organic reflex reactions to an atmosphere that is effectively repellant on account of its beholdenness to the dictates of transit. And to a system aimed quite specifically at preventing intruders, strangers, outcasts from finding peace or a home.
Formulating and documenting all this in a socially critical vein would be in and of itself a necessary if highly charged step. But like in many of her other works, Jermolaewa also reserves space for further questions: Is one also prohibited from dreaming in places where one’s not allowed to sleep? Or: What dreams do arise if one sleeps there? For that matter, who does actually sleep there? And what monsters does, say, the “sleep of reason” produce? Upon repeated viewing, RESEARCH FOR A SLEEPING POSITION itself seems like some kind of hastily sketched dream. A nightmare for which real structures have more or less laid a solid foundation. Inhumane urban architecture, for example, about which Jacques Tati’s PLAYTIME may well have still moved one to laugh at some points, seems here to have long since morphed into cruel and shabby everyday routineness equal to any fiction as a complex anxious fantasy filled with contradictions. Conditions themselves are set aswirl—and the resulting effects on new narratives, other dramaturgies, can be studied quite well in light of Anna Jermolaewa’s work.
“Video interests me only as a tool” is the title of the very first of our “KONTAKT Video Portraits” that we have been filming since 2020 and that we now, by way of congratulating the artist on this occasion, present as a preview: Anna Jermolaewa’s recollections here include how her applications for admission to the Academy of Fine Arts Vienna during the 1990s were rejected five times. “That was a lucky thing,” recounts this recipient of the 2020 Austrian Art Prize who went on to become a master of supremely nimble-footed conceptual art in association with what was then Peter Kogler’s class at the Academy following classical training in Russia, emigration very early in life, and diligent efforts to escape the realm of the artful. We thus present you here with a conversation about wanderlust, cats, those fortunate decisions to turn on video cameras, and long-running research in light of which the actual “doing” is a comparatively quick affair.
Claus Philipp
The present text quotes passages of an essay that C. P. authored for the catalog of the retrospective “Anna Jermolaewa. Number Two” at the Schlossmuseum in Linz, which was on view from 23 November 2022 until 5 March 2023.
Claus Philipp is a publicist and dramaturge. He lives and works in Vienna.
March 2023
RESEARCH FOR SLEEPING POSITIONS (2006), a video with which Jermolaewa is represented in the KONTAKT COLLECTION, exemplifies this in her characteristic blend of sharp analytic distinctions and laconic humor. Its filming location: the concourse at Vienna’s Westbahnhof, one of the Austrian capital’s main centers of arrival and departure by rail—a place that, by its very nature, is heavily frequented by people including refugees and immigrants of every stripe. The rolling video camera observes a young woman “testing” out one of the wooden benches installed by station management, perfidious constructions that actually consist of three separate chair-elements. One could put it this way: what is being tested here is a claim to the status of “wooden bench” manifested as a utilitarian design deliberately broken into small segments so as to prevent long-term sitting, to say nothing of repose or even sleep. Which is to say that this thing fails to perform its function as a “bench.” It most definitely does, however—as apparently intended by those who had it set up—serve a purpose by not inviting one to linger.
The young woman is Anna Jermolaewa herself. Dressed appropriately for the inhospitable conditions here in her hooded tracksuit and a winter coat, Jermolaewa attempts to figure out feasible seated and reclining postures that could somehow outfox this system of exclusion and its uninviting design. In this, RESEARCH FOR SLEEPING POSITIONS seems more like a recording of personally motivated field research. But at the same time and especially in light of its sheer rawness, it does seem something like a parody of “art” or even “performance in the public space,” where artists apply their worldviews in all kinds of virtuosic or at least demonstrative ways. In this case, the observer bears witness to a very concrete struggle for survival. Posture, position, framing, and motion: in Anna Jermolaewa’s scenario, these are not artistic parameters but rather organic reflex reactions to an atmosphere that is effectively repellant on account of its beholdenness to the dictates of transit. And to a system aimed quite specifically at preventing intruders, strangers, outcasts from finding peace or a home.
Formulating and documenting all this in a socially critical vein would be in and of itself a necessary if highly charged step. But like in many of her other works, Jermolaewa also reserves space for further questions: Is one also prohibited from dreaming in places where one’s not allowed to sleep? Or: What dreams do arise if one sleeps there? For that matter, who does actually sleep there? And what monsters does, say, the “sleep of reason” produce? Upon repeated viewing, RESEARCH FOR A SLEEPING POSITION itself seems like some kind of hastily sketched dream. A nightmare for which real structures have more or less laid a solid foundation. Inhumane urban architecture, for example, about which Jacques Tati’s PLAYTIME may well have still moved one to laugh at some points, seems here to have long since morphed into cruel and shabby everyday routineness equal to any fiction as a complex anxious fantasy filled with contradictions. Conditions themselves are set aswirl—and the resulting effects on new narratives, other dramaturgies, can be studied quite well in light of Anna Jermolaewa’s work.
“Video interests me only as a tool” is the title of the very first of our “KONTAKT Video Portraits” that we have been filming since 2020 and that we now, by way of congratulating the artist on this occasion, present as a preview: Anna Jermolaewa’s recollections here include how her applications for admission to the Academy of Fine Arts Vienna during the 1990s were rejected five times. “That was a lucky thing,” recounts this recipient of the 2020 Austrian Art Prize who went on to become a master of supremely nimble-footed conceptual art in association with what was then Peter Kogler’s class at the Academy following classical training in Russia, emigration very early in life, and diligent efforts to escape the realm of the artful. We thus present you here with a conversation about wanderlust, cats, those fortunate decisions to turn on video cameras, and long-running research in light of which the actual “doing” is a comparatively quick affair.
Claus Philipp
The present text quotes passages of an essay that C. P. authored for the catalog of the retrospective “Anna Jermolaewa. Number Two” at the Schlossmuseum in Linz, which was on view from 23 November 2022 until 5 March 2023.
Claus Philipp is a publicist and dramaturge. He lives and works in Vienna.
March 2023