ANNA SORENSON

BIO

Born and raised in Stockholm, Anna Sörenson received her BFA from Umeå University in Sweden. In 2012, Anna received her MFA from Pratt Institute, New York supported by her Fulbright Scholarship. 2014 she graduated from a.pass, a yearlong post-master program in performance art in Brussels, Belgium.
She assembled her first solo exhibition in the fall of 2012, at Ed Varie in New York City and has exhibited her work in Stockholm, Brussels, Berlin, New York and Miami. She currently lives and works in Stockholm.

FRAME OF RESEARCH

I work with a meta-bureaucracy where I play the role as the “Head of the Department.” I have been working with the project since winter 2012 incorporating performance, collaboration, film, sound works and installations.
I have conducting interviews, as my characters, that emulates a border control interview. Their testimonials to my character has laid the ground for creating an ongoing archive where their stories create a parallel world where their most private concerns, dreams and fears are treated with great seriousness under the playful circumstances. Parallel to the performance work, I have developed the psychological character of my bureaucratic persona in collaboration with a psychologist in the film “Therapy with a bureaucrat.” To maintain the aesthetics of the bureaucratic transparency, I created an installation called the “Surveillance Room” where I analyzed my character’s behavior via diagrammatic drawings, laying bare the full archive of the interviews and translating and re-recording the therapy session.
The questions and concerns I am hoping to continue to work with is the balance between parody and serious critique of society and the feeling of undergoing something of importance and transformative in the performance context. I also want to investigate the aesthetics of bureaucracies: the specific value of time in relation to paperwork and archiving, organization of material and symbols of power. I found Brussels specifically to be an interesting and complex city, where different political layers and languages are in constant flux and bureaucratic time seems infinite.