Anna Bak (b. 1985, Denmark) is a visual artist and curator/organizer. She works in different medias, primarily with installation and sculpture. She took her Master in Fine Arts from The Funen Arts Academy in Denmark with an supplementing Fullbright exchange year at Montana State University in Bozeman, Montana, USA.
Bak is interested in stories that are based on conflicts between nature and culture as well as socio-cultural paradoxes. She examines the way people observe and relate to nature and geographical placement at an existential level; in particular connected with a post-industrial melancholy and melancholy associated with the loss of harmony with nature.
“A central focus of my practice is a fascination with nature, not rooted in a romantic and aesthetic cultivation of its grandeur, but more in an examination of the way people observe and relate to nature at a more existential level; It may be anthropomorphism, where the natural world is imposed with human tendencies and emotions. Or it may be a kind of post-industrial melancholy and alienation, often associated with the loss of harmony with nature or of ‘original’ culture. Both terms are in themselves problematical, and interesting to me at the same time. Does it even make sense to talk about original culture, and what is this feeling of loss based on? I see my work as a kind of philosophical and visual research. I get interested in a story, a theme or a specific object because it triggers more exsistential questions for me. I often do a lot of research and extended reading on my projects. In the process of working with the object or installation, the transition between research and the formal becomes fluid. The viewer might still experience traces of the original research, but when the language of form is applied to the matter, new meanings and associations are created that are less tangible – but still close to the triggering points that started the whole process for me.”
