Ananké Asseff

Buenos Aires, Argentina, 1979

            At the core of Ananké Asseff's artistic concerns is an insistent question: what happens to the body when it is crossed by the gaze, the presence, the figure of another? The forces that pass through it bring into play not only the memory and the individual experience of that body, but also the reactions, stimuli, and emotions it receives when it interacts and relates to the environment. It is therefore not by chance that Asseff's first medium, and, perhaps, the one whose formal characteristics substantially mark her production, is photography. Always exploring the links between subjectivity and the unknown, one of the elements that emerge from her pieces is the way in which this otherness can be neutralized by paranoia, fear, or confinement, phenomena which, from the artist's perspective, characterize contemporary society.

            In a series of photographs grouped under the title P.B., Asseff sought to highlight the sexist violence latent in society and to dismantle the idea of "woman" as an available object. With Potencial, she developed a series of forceful frontal portraits in which we can see a group of armed citizens within their own domestic spaces. She participated in the Bienal Internacional de Artes Visuales of the Museo Nacional de Bellas Artes in 2002, and, since then, took part in numerous exhibitions, until holding a first anthological exhibition of her work in 2017, organized by the Centro de Fotografía de Montevideo, Uruguay, where more than 60 works were displayed. There, her expansion towards other formats – video, installation, writing, and even sound work, – which made her artistic discourse more complex, is noticeable.

            This question about the way in which her targets, and later also the spectators, look at the world, led her to try a more experimental language in increasingly strange, hardly recognizable scenarios, such as images of natures in which the central scene appears occluded, shots that have been taken to monochrome in which the figures become practically unnoticeable, and performance recordings in which the interacting bodies merge until they become indistinguishable.