Anna Reutinger: At The Wunderwall Antwerp
Anna Reutinger (b. 1991, Oakland) tints social, material and historical moments into tales with many voices and shades. Working with second hand textiles and glass, natural dyes, watercolors, scrap metal, agricultural byproducts, social encounters and distant histories, she enacts a hands-on approach to research—highlighting craft as seed for social, material and environmental sensitivity. From large-scale installations to performative workshops, she invites others into a cave of potentials, hand crafted to pull you belly outwards into the muck of collective imagining.
She is a tutor in the Dirty Art Department at the Sandberg Instituut Amsterdam where she also received her M.A. in 2016 after a B.A. in Design Media Arts and Digital Humanities at UCLA in 2013. She has held residence at Triangle – Astérides, Marseille, FR—Rupert, Vilnius, LT—and Jan van Eyck, Maastricht, NL. Her work has been exhibited at the CAPC musée d’art contemporain de Bordeaux, FRAC Corsica, Saint Etienne Biennale, FR—MKG Museum für Kunst und Gewerbe Hamburg, DE—The Living Art Museum, Reykjavik, IS—W139, Amsterdam, De Fabriek, Eindhoven, NL—Ausstellungsraum Klingental, Basel, CH—Macao Milano, IT—The Hammer Museum, The Getty Center, The New Wight Gallery, Los Angeles, US.
This is not the first or the last time
This series references labor strikes, popular protests and revolts led largely by textile workers in the late middle ages as they fought inequities sound familiar today—increases in rent, spikes in the cost of grain and salt, low wages, unjust taxation of the poor and lack of representation in government. The oldest labor strikes on record took place in Flanders, and are crucial to our understanding of this long period of transition at the beginning of wage labor, where class inequities were often violently confronted. The stories of these confrontations have been diminished, erased or skewed by the elite (holders of historical record) and to this day, are mistold to favor the widely accepted theory of the origins of capitalism as being a “natural” evolution.
As an artist working with primarily with textiles, I took an interest in these stories, especially the moments when the tools of the trade were used as tools of resistance. Textile work has always been (and continues to be) underpaid, undervalued and performed largely by a female work force. Through retelling these stories from the perspective of someone who knows that craft, I hope to add value to to their memory, ask the viewer to empathize with them and consider contemporary inequities driven by the valuing of capital over human and non human life, and the voices that are erased by those who control the history books.
