Anne Glassner
Scholarship at the VALIE EXPORT Center Linz
May - December 2023
Anne Glassner is a performer as well as a video and installation artist. She deals with recurring and everyday activities. The theme of sleep has been a major point in her artistic work for some time, finding expression in sleep performances and staged photography, among other things. In this the artist raises questions about the conditions of activity / inactivity and productivity / unproductivity and blurs the boundaries between private and public as well as between staging and reality.
Glassner studied painting with Johanna Kandl at the University of Applied Arts in Vienna, among other things. She has given sleep performances and held workshops at various exhibitions in Austria and elsewhere. Glassner’s works have been supported multiple times with scholarships and are represented in public collections in Austria.
During her scholarship, Anne Glassner explored alternative ways of archiving performance art. In a live performance at the opening evening, she also addressed VALIE EXPORT's Body Configurations (1972–1982). In Vienna, she visited the locations where EXPORT created works in order to approach them in a lying position.
The VALIE EXPORT Center inspired Glassner to create a photo series. Wearing a turquoise overall sewn by her grandmother, which is also an allusion her self-assured, tobacco worker great-grandmother, Glassner explored the architecture of the heritage ensemble Tabakfabrik Linz / Linz Tobacco Factory. Turquoise cushions, props left over from a collective sleep performance, are reminders of a sleepover held together with a school class in the offices of the VALIE EXPORT Center, at which the return to production and labor was discussed. The duvet set up in the room offers access to a “thoughts archive.” Internal processes are turned inside out, are communicated to the outside. The turquoise banner marked “Expanding” together with Glassner's prone and sleeping form can only be seen if you look out of a window in the Lentos Art Museum towards the Linz University of Arts. The color turquoise is important: it features in the architecture of the Tabakfabrik and a turquoise thread runs through Glassner's work from Linz to Vienna and back again.
