Thou Art My Only Desire
A Waxy Pith occasion.

THURSDAY 24 NOVEMBER 2011 | 18-21H

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The video À Chacun sa vérité refers to Anna Byskov’s explorations into the insanity and tragicomedy of the Italian dramatist Pirandello. Often tainted with humour, his characters are searching for their own identities, not knowing anymore whether they are flesh-and-blood beings or simply society’s puppets. Here on four screens, variously synchronised and decidedly cacophonous, Anna portrays the ambiguity of madness by way of four individual characters whose trite gossip about a neighbour is wholeheartedly shared with one another in an abundant and most sincere fashion, ad continuum, and ultimately inseparably.

Anna has developed a performance especially for this Waxy Pith occasion. Contained herein are distinct tinges of Bruce Nauman’s Violent Incident (1986), in which the voice and body are employed as instruments of choice, revealing the madness that dwells within us, the vacuum that gnaws at us, the death that faces us, directly involving the audience as victims or guinea pigs. In her performance, Anna constructs the terribly romantic scenario of a woman’s invitation to her lover to come for a home-cooked meal one evening. With dinner preparations underway and a perfectly arranged table setting in place, there is nothing but promise in the air.

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Anna Byskov‘s video and performance works traverse the indistinct zones of non-sense, contra-sense, or anti-sense, in which the absurd consistently prevails. Brought by a concerted quest to find the right words within an array of native cultures, she contrives works that necessarily speak for themselves. The different characters Anna creates are faced with issues of action or communication, in which an attempted achievement is consistently blindsided, producing frustration and auto-derision, expressed in a tumultuous repetition of gesture and word.

In the universes Anna fabricates, things readily slip out of control. She transposes herself through her archetypal characters, as so many facets of a single personality. Filled with tragicomic soliloquies, the scenes she conjures feature vain actions in somewhat chaotic scenarios. Emptied of their meaning, these inverted situations open up an intense poetic space. Anna portrays all of her characters herself, to directly experience the complex relationship between author, producer and actor, thereby rejoining the idea of “kicking one’s own ass”, as she so succinctly puts it.

A fraught atmosphere is constructed between the fiction of the particular characters she portrays and the blatant fury she performs. Anna speaks to her audience of failure – not only as a theme, but as a contradictory objective. The essence of her work lies in the attempt of the impossible, in applying all one’s strength to achieve one’s demise. Evoked in her oeuvre are the themes of individuality, persistence, and the eternal quest for happiness…

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LOCATION: Quai du Commerce 11 | 1000 Brussels | Belgium

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