Anna Vasof

Shoes, domino and happiness

After studying architecture at the University of Thessaly (Greece) Vasof continued her education at the University of Applied Arts in Vienna and currently holds a scholarship from the Austrian SAMMLUNG LENIKUS fund. Her exhibition biography includes the Thessaloniki Biennale of Contemporary Art (2007, Greece) and Shanghai Design Biennale (2014), exhibitions at the mumok Museum of Modern Art (Vienna, 2014), Museum of Applied Arts (Vienna, 2014), KunstHausWien (Vienna, 2014) and Künstlerhaus (Vienna, 2013), as well as three Crash Fest festivals (Thessaloniki, 2006, 2007 and 2008).

The MAMM exhibition shows three new video installations by the artist, Mechanisms of Happiness, Down to Earth and Domino, which was recently awarded the Asifa Austria Award / Best Austrian Animation 2014.

Vasof’s projects exist simultaneously in several hypostases: sculpture; performance in which this sculpture is used and ‘comes to life’, acquiring a kinetic dimension and turning into a both performative and narrative object; and, finally, video shot on the basis of performance.

The artist formulates her main creative principle as follows: ‘I want an element of the unexpected in each of my works that tears us away from everyday reality and lets us see the world in a new perspective’.

Indeed, Vasof’s sculptures are devised with an ingenuity worthy of the legendary Swiss artist duo Fischli and Weiss or German artist Rebecca Horn.

It is actually the sculpture rather than the person that becomes the principal character in Vasof’s video and performances and plays the leading role around which the entire narrative is built.

They employ everyday articles familiar to everyone: drinking glasses, frying pans, boots, fly swatters, pumps, electrical plugs, water taps, mousetraps, umbrellas, etc., but used in a way that is far removed from their ordinary designation. The artist constructs absurd and impractical mechanisms from them so that familiar objects change their original functional purpose.

In today’s world we are constantly surrounded by technical devices. They ensure our domestic comfort, assist in timesaving and help us achieve the best possible result. Our everyday existence is filled with them and life without them is impossible to imagine. Production and consumption of a never-ending succession of new technical gadgets become an integral part of the modern concept of happiness — the assumption that it is possible to achieve or at least approximate happiness by mechanistic means. In her works Vasof makes the totality of mechanistic formulae an object of criticism, reducing it to absurdity and directing her irony at it.

Anna Zaytseva