Annie Rapstoff
#Frontier

10.02.21 03.03.21

Annie Rapstoff is an artist living in The United Kingdom. She was born in London and is now living in Oxfordshire. She works as a psychotherapist and artist, with an interest in responses and relationship to place, the environment and what is to be human. Her work has been shown in galleries, at conferences, platform/live art events and in public spaces. Recent work, has included responses to the pandemic including a series of works in which she inhabits masks assembled into bird extensions.

ARTIST´S STATEMENT

Annie Rapstoff is a cross disciplinary artist, interested in the interrelationship with place and the human experience in dialogue with other species. Work may take the form of instructions, events, performance for the camera and in situ, gestures, interventions, video and writing/language.

Past work has been participatory, collaborative and often process based or ephemeral, she may appear explicitly or anonymously in the work. She questions what she hears, what she feels and what she experiences in space, through objects and across time. Water has been a recurring theme in her work, which has included several collaborations over the past 12 years. The resulting works were shown at Liquidscapes in 2018 a conference concerning water in Devon UK. Since the Pandemic, she has been exploring the interconnection between animal, plant life and humans.

ABOUT FRONTIER

In the first project, Annie began by working on ideas around home during lock down, due to the pandemic, exploring the underbelly of the domestic environment. This included home as a contested space, a gendered space, a privileged space, a place of safety and threat. Working with thresholds as a frontier, particularly the “line between” doorways, halls, rooms and the “space” between furniture, Annie was interested in pursuing the notion of permeability, vulnerability and questions about safety inside or outside the home, in the time of the Pandemic.

In the second project, she teamed up with two other artists in the group from the UK and Canada, working on themes of collection and return in relation to water. The site specific areas included the River Thames in Oxfordshire UK, Matheson Lake, British Columbia, Canada and Paignton Harbour in Devon, UK. Dialogue between the three artists and in the larger group was essential to the work and informed the resulting video sketch.

BIO
Annie Rapstoff
London, United Kingdom
Lives and works in Oxfordshire, United Kingdom

STUDIES
1997 | BA Critical Fine Art Practice, Central St Martins, London, UK
2000 | MA Fine Art, Middlesex University, London, UK

EXHIBITIONS
2021 | Home Bird, a participatory live online artists event entitled Be-coming Tree.
2020 | Visiting Bird, a performance intervention at Stephens House and Gardens, London, UK
2018 | Continuum a film shown at Liquidscapes, Dartington,, Art and Earth Conference. Performance and text Annie Rapstoff, Devon, UK
2014 | Fluctuations in Sound at 365 Drawings 365 Dessins, Open day at Brock Keep, Reading, UK

RESIDENCIES
2018 | Residency, exploring red sandstone, Manorbier, Wales, UK
2014 | Residency concerning water research on The Gower Peninsula, Wales, UK
2014 | Residency with exhibition, curated by Rekha Sameer, Hontianske Trstany, Slovakia
2013 | Micro residency in collaboration with Vicky Vergou, Between Waters; at Filament Studio, Magdalen Road Studios, Oxford, UK
2011 | Residency on LV21, a steel-hulled lightship and floating art space, Gillingham Kent, UK

PUBLICATIONS
2019 | Continuum, Liquidscapes published by art.earth
2008 | The Go-Between a collaborative performance project, discussed the publication for the exhibition Umfeld <> Inwelt at The Frauen Museum, Bonn, Germany

Related Activities

Exhibitions, Together Apart

#3 | FRONTIER: results
Artists in dialogue

10.03.21

Frontiers as geopolitical frontiers, as cultural, biopolitical; frontiers as limits and as separations within the artistic disciplines, frontiers as hegemonic considerations of our bodies and identities…were some of the approaches on FRONTIER general theme in the Together Apart Program #3 session.

Through 4 encounters we collectively and individually created ideas and artworks which explored a non-binary approach of the topic. The participant artists also had the possibility to dialogue with Kristina Borg and Liz Ingram & Bernd Hildebrant, international artists and former ´ace artists-in-residence, invited to present their contributions and explorations in relation to the topic. For this session we also gave priority to moments of peer review or collective feedback and to open discussions which drifted through issues of art and therapy, art and research, participatory art, the complexity of artistic collaboration and how collective practice appears to be a right to claim even more in moments of isolation.

Through different theoretical readings and artistic references, and through the proposals of each of the participant artists, we identified the importance of liminal states, the non-binary, we assumed the difficulty of inhabiting the in-between but also recognized that art practice is what allows us to live in ambiguous states and to constantly raise questions. We also explored other practices as breathing techniques, meditation and knowledge and skills sharing as methods to break through discriminative or isolating frontiers.

Using poetry, film, online performances, video art and the creation of a network for artists through the method of “participatory asset mapping”, the artists from this cohort created in search of commonalities in their migrant’s everyday experiences, resonances among the natural conditions of the places they live in, the links among their identities and psychological researches and in search of practical collaborations to continue working in the future.

DANIELA RUIZ MORENO | curator-in-residence

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