Headworks

In Headworks, her ten-minute episodic film, the “object and media magician” Anna Vasof plays with the pictorial language of idioms. In 25 humorous miniatures, Vasof takes sayings about the human head literally, puts them in visual form, and gives them a three-dimensional existence. To do this, she uses her own head, which she has made casts of on many previous occasions. Sometimes Vasof places this head on a lifesize torso; or for example she pulls a woolen strand out through its nose from a ball of yarn on top of its open skull. Her head smokes, sits in a bucket, or is about to burst. Often, absurd contraptions exert manmade pressure on the heads. While Vasof’s visualizations are witty, sometimes they also hold secrets within: the images generate their own semantics, allowing for a joyful excess in these minimalist scenarios.

In her serial self-portrait, Vasof takes idioms literally by deliberately overlooking their abstract metaphorical content. This intentional conceptual obtuseness reveals our unconscious use of images in language. Here, an image is given over to language, taken at face value, and thus becomes vivid again. At the same time, through their pictorial nature, the idioms regain their original and immediate connection to concrete situations. In this way, the title simultaneously refers to two different kinds of “head works”: through performative means, Vasof gives physical form to an idiom that had previously been intellectualized. This visualization is reminiscent of Pieter Bruegel the Elder’s famous oil painting Netherlandish Proverbs (1559), which gathers over 100 sayings in foolishly grotesque images of everyday life. As with Bruegel, in Headworks a world emerges in which language becomes action – and action becomes a reflection of social conditions and approaches. (Friederike Horstmann)

Translation: John Wojtowicz