Life & Art

Visual and sound artist, Ana Maria Asan invites us to reflect on what we are: Memory. Remembering or forgetting reshapes everyday the course of our lives and the future of generations to come. Through her creations, the artist highlights also the thematic of the blurred frontier between dream and reality, femininity and the deviant attitude of man in relation with nature, among others.

Asan’s work encompasses different media and brings constantly the viewer towards a poetic zone, introspection and wonder. Her practice is intuitive and experimental; it doesn’t matter whether she has to mix sound, center a lump of clay, deal with fibers or cast glass. Taking risks is a way of life for her.

She is best known for SONORES, her project associating experimentally ceramics and sound. From the spontaneous exploration of the sonorous dimension of fired clays to the complex relationship between the objects or installations and the architecture, the artist seeks to push the boundaries of ceramics using this old medium in a contemporary manner and constantly questions the role and place of the spectator. More than once, the viewer becomes a listener and the listener discovers oneself as the viewer of an interior world, dreamed, remembered or imagined. And this is exactly what Ana Maria Asan is looking for: to create a favourable environment where the presence of the artwork and the connection between the physical space and the mental one invites one to deeply think and discover his capacity of amazement.

With Twisted Ceramics, she contributes to liberate the medium from its traditional craft approach and, as in general in Asan’s work, from its intrinsic heaviness. The clay strips obtained first painfully by throwing big cylinders and then cutting them, later she simply extrudes, shapes and uses them as undulating elements ready to proliferate and partially invade the Double Hôtel de Bodt in Brussels, a 1929 Henry Van de Velde building, exempt of right-angles. The interest for architecture characteristics seems obvious in this Ana Maria Asan’s early site-specific installation. Actually, she found more inspiration by remembering different childhood activities as playing frenetically with different type of rubber games with other girls of her age. From there, she made other analogies with experienced montagne russe sensations and the Möbius strip. Last but not least, on the occasion of exhibiting this work, she makes a short interactive digital animation with rubber bands.