ALICE ANDERSON

Alice Anderson’s oeuvre hybridises the worlds of technology and ancestral cultures. Her works include sculptures, paintings and drawings generated through dance-performances, each with ritual at their essence.

For this exhibition, Alice Anderson presents performative works created through repetitive gestures, some coupled with rapid breathing (the technique of hyperventilation), which gives her access to a state of modified consciousness.

This pairing puts forward the body as a vehicle of humanity within the contemporary world propelling towards a technological-wholeness; and the ancestral culture of the Kogi people from Sierra Nevada in Colombia, who exist in cosmic harmony with their environment. Kogi concepts, rituals and ecological combats have framed Alice Anderson’s reflections upon this change in civilization.

James Bridle, in his book New Dark Age: Technology and the end of the future, speaks of the changes in civilisation that have been instigated by developments in artificial intelligence. He describes a world with increasing technological complexity which diminishes human comprehension, where we, in turn, become lost in an ocean of information. He asks the following questions: What does technology teach us? Is more data sufficient to build a better world? How far will control and progress go within our so-called ‘civilised’ societies? Is our existence, nowadays only comprehensible via computers? What makes us human?

Such certainties regarding the uncertain-world-ahead has led Anderson to explore memory, seeking to memorise a material world that is dissolving before us, as though the material world might contain a form of connection with our physical existences.

‘The challenge is not to decry these complex technologies but to continue to question the relationships between humans, the environment and the machine. One of my answers ‘goes’ through spirituality that expresses another definition of things and redefines a certain balance of what escapes us. In this sense, my performed rituals take on all their importance because they are a physical re-appropriation of what has been dematerialised’ says Anderson.