Anna Koutsafti
Anna Koutsafti is a multidisciplinary Greek artist currently working in Glasgow, Scotland. Her works intertwine text and images, form and meaning, to create textile installations. Anna questions the digital realm, the contradictions of popular imagery and sophisticated abstraction. Working with mostly poor images, scavenged online, or produced by the artist through unconventional means, she interrogates the oftentimes dystopic sovereignty of the HD digital word that fuses itself with our reality. Her autofictional work is exploring themes of uncertainty, desire and generalized anxiety, all byproducts of the unstable reality of our times. Fused together these elements constitute what the artist is proposing as the new dystopian aesthetics.
Anna Koutsafti holds a BA in Fine Art with merit from the École Nationale Supérieure d’Art de Bourges and is currently working towards her MFA at the Glasgow School of Art. She has participated in a collective printmaking residency at the Frans Masereel Centrum in Belgium. Her work has featured in multiple exhibitions, such as: On Geoffroy Tory at the Bibliotheque des Quatres Pilliers in Bourges, France. Orbiting Modernity at Tranzit Cluj in Romania. Labyrinth: how many times? at the New Glasgow Society in Glasgow, UK. Do Something at the Barnes Garage in Glasgow, UK
We Would Live In An Ugly City And We Would Be Happy, 2023
“Let the others go to Switzerland, to Los Angeles, To
Saint Mauricius, to the Bermuda Triangle. We, would live
in an ugly city and we would be happy” is how Nikos Panayotopoulos film Beautiful People ends. It was playing on the TV in a heatwave packed Athens an afternoon as I was coming down from the panic attack my latest love affair was raging on me.
“We Would Live In An Ugly City And We Would Be Happy” is a love story between Athens and Glasgow, both ugly cities, both are places where we could be happy. Longing and desire exist as ghosts, that haunt these places I walk through, the places I inhabit. I take images of these places that reflect these spectres, images that are themselves ghosts, poor and abstract.
Using photographs taken through a burner phone, I am exploring the abstract qualities of the poor image, as defined by Hito Steyerl “ The poor image tends toward abstraction: it is a visual idea in its very becoming. […] It mocks the promises of digital technology. Not only is it often degraded to the point of being just a hurried blur, one even doubts whether it could be called an image at all.” Juxtaposing the abstract images of the city I inhabit with text that recounts fragments of desire and longing I am presenting a narration that recounts the anxiety of falling in and out of love and existing in an unfamiliar place.
“We Would Live In An Ugly City And We’d Be Happy” exists as fragmented pieces of a series taking form
through different interventions on textile, opening up the opportunity to play and experiment with their placement
in a space, and crating different narrative options for the viewer to explore whilst visiting the space.
Archangel, 2023
Archangel is a semi-autofictional narrative following the flight of a celestial object as it burns through the Earth’s atmosphere over the town of Archangel. Fiction bleeds into reality, creating a narrative of personal difficulties, current affairs and scientific occurrences. Archangel is maybe more of a religious reference than an actual geographical coordinate and could be both the destination and the object burning through Earth’s atmosphere.
