ANNA BRODY

 
 
 
 

Anna Brody, Double-exposure video still view of person in bathtub leaning back as the hands of someone behind them rubs the crown of their head.

here together, like before (nothing looks like God quite as much as time does) Anna Brody, Video, 29 min 24 sec, 2023
Featured in the Anthropology of Motherhood: Kinship & Othermothering Film Series at the Harris Theater with the Three Rivers Arts Festival in 2024.

 
 

Here Together, Like Before explores platonic, romantic, and familial intimacy, and the labor of caregiving. It deals in life and loss, honoring those whose touch I am lucky enough to receive and reciprocate, and acting as an ongoing acceptance practice for the many I cannot touch or invite into my home, for whom I cannot pour tea or run a bath. They are alive, they are dead, they aren’t yet born, they’re not here with me. I pour water for them, I continue the motions of my hands and arms for them, I record their absence in visual space for posterity, for mourning, for the future. The project poses questions about the possibilities of queer self-parenting strategies, the economy of time, and what we leave behind. I work in 4D to be explicit about the labor and time involved in cooperative connection, and to engage in embodied explorations of repetition, endurance, trust, and fear–of love as an action word. My process includes identifying and testing different styles of interrogation to confront the conjoined natures of subject and gaze.

 

My work in video and performance addresses love relationships of all intersecting kinds, and the internalized values that mediate them. I seek to dissolve the barrier between knowing something and feeling it; I hope that, by aligning actions with words, I might begin to repair the disconnect often found there and build trust in my own queer socio-emotional lens through which I understand our romantic, familial, and platonic relationships. I work in 4D to be explicit about the labor and time involved in cooperative connection, engaging in embodied explorations of repetition, endurance, trust, and fear–of love as an action word. My process involves identifying and testing different styles of interrogation and confronting the conjoined natures of subject and gaze. It is my understanding that the drive to try anyway–to attempt to grow and hope and thrive together in community in the face of so many unknowns and so little control–is our species’ collective insanity and communal tenderness, and the only thing lighting our way into an uncertain future.

 
 
 

Anna Brody. Artist sits with eyes closed, wavy hair catching sunlight streaming in from window to the left, holding child. Both are nude, at rest, savoring a quiet moment of connection.

Still from never let me down, Anna Brody, Video, 4 min 4 sec, 2021
Featured in the Anthropology of Motherhood: Culture of Care & Intersections with Disability Art Exhibition at the Three Rivers Arts Festival in 2023.

 
 
 

Anna Brody (she/they) is an artist and educator currently based out of Tucson, Arizona and some other places. She works with video, performance, and photography to describe and explore the non-linear, non-binary world of simultaneous connection and lateral growth. Their video installations and interactive performances express a lifetime preoccupation with the layering of romantic, familial, and platonic love relationships in our lives, and the mutual labor and trust required for them to thrive. As a queer and non-binary artist and educator, they hope only to shift decisively away from the transactional, and towards the transformational. Anna graduated magna cum laude with a B.F.A. from the Savannah College of Art and Design, and received her M.F.A. in Photo, Video, & Imaging from the University of Arizona in May 2021. Their work has been exhibited internationally, including at the Yale MFA Thesis exhibition and a screening at Librería Casa Bosques in Mexico City; and, most recently, at the Anthropology of Motherhood exhibition in Pittsburgh and G.A.S. Station in Berlin.