DANAI ANESIADOU
Born 1973, Germany
Lives and works in Brussels
Born in Germany, raised in Greece, moved to Belgium, trained as a costume designer, and now, finally, working as an artist in the expanded field of performance: it should come as no surprise that the mercurial biographical trajectory of Danai Anesiadou (°1973) has produced an artistic practice of matching convolution, confusion even. Tapping from a wide variety of sources in the adjoining realms of leftfield popular (‘low’) culture and the canonical forms of ‘high’ culture, the art of Anesiadou – and an ever-changing cast of collaborators and travelling companions, many of whom will feature prominently in this fall’s Isomosis: Danai Invites Her Talented Friends festival at Etablissement d'en face – is perhaps best appreciated and enjoyed against the referential backdrop of avant-garde cinema and the envelope-pushing, genre-bending, mould-breaking film art of such maverick auteurs as John Cassavetes, Alejandro Jodorowsky and Alain Resnais. In her collaborative work with stage art stalwarts Hans Bryssinck and Diederik Peeters, she has explored the tenuous diegetic fictions that underpin narrative conventions in feature films of the lowly gothic/horror variety – with a generous dose of operatic satire that reveals the true extent of her artistic debt to her scenographic training and earlier forays (now long forgotten, and mainly for good reasons) into the world of dance and theatre. In Murder Mysteries/Same Difference, Anesiadou teamed up with Swiss-Greek choreographer Alexandra Bachzetsis to produce a tightly directed, wordless reflection upon the gestural language of Hitchcock-styled thriller art, complete with the mythical figure of the double that is one of the genre’s defining staple items. In A Night of Psychomagia, which premiered at the Berlin Biennial earlier this year, she convincingly married a strong sense for the theatre of autobiographical confession with a long-standing interest in the netherworld of magical practices and its secret knowledges: partly inspired by her encounter with the aging tarot master Jodorowsky, Anesiadou’s “night of psychomagia” also offered the audience an uncomfortable (and at times uncomfortably hilarious) insight into the neurotic mess of her stage character’s family history and private life. Compared to the ruthless, gut-wrenching exhibitionism of that performance, Anesiadou’s film X, A & M, made in collaboration with Brussels-based artist Sophie Nys, may seem positively icy and tame, academic even – an impression made even more inescapable once it becomes clear that their project is based on a shared enthusiasm for Alain Resnais’ elegiac, elusive Nouvelle Vague classic L’Année dernière à Marienbad from 1960. Parts of X, A & M were shot at Nymphenburg Palace in Bavaria, the lavish original site of Resnais’ detached character study (itself set in the present-day Czech spa town of Mariánské Lázne or Marienbad); yet there also appear scenes set in a dentist’s cabinet, as well as in the bizarre timewarp that is the Paul Delvaux museum in St. Idesbald – the source of yet more subdued Surrealist stoicism. Periodically enacting parts of the original, Robbe-Grillet-penned dialogue (here heard in voice-over) of L’Année dernière à Marienbad, Anesiadou appears – alongside a stone-faced, lugubrious-looking Diederik Peeters – as a mysterious, world-weary young woman locked inside the desolate dreamworld of Central European, aristocratic sanatorium culture, the imagined decadent backdrop of some of her earlier work, likewise engaged in a scenography of mood rather than straightforward narration.
Danai Anesiadou’s X, A & M is shown here for the first time, in the architectural equivalent of the artist’s elusive, perennially inconclusive fantasy: in a private ‘cinema’ underneath the staircase, made to measure her restless exploration of what constitutes her, their, our ‘subconscious’.
Dieter Roelstraete