An Interview with Anna-Lena Krause

Interview by Ally Ferraro

Photographer Mika Kailes

Tell me about the title “Two Cities with the Same Name”. I know you are a visual artist and photographer exploring sociological and cultural issues in modern societies. How did this title come about?

I write down random sentences or thoughts a lot that resonate with me for unknown reasons at the time. I like to think they all find their place eventually, start making sense in a new setting - come full circle in a way.

When I think about the title ‘Two cities with the same name’ now it gives me a feeling of duality. The coexistence of someone else, like a doppelganger, or a kindred spirit that is unknown but still linked to us.

When I was a child, I was fascinated by the amount of people living in the world and the vastness of it all. I remember thinking a lot about someone else I didn’t know somewhere in the world or thinking the same thing as I was at that moment. By that creating an invisible bond - an entanglement with an unknown other.

I want to pick up on the idea that by working with friends and members of your community, combining photography, film and sculptures, you are exploring phenomenology, intersubjectivity, inter-corporeality and mirroring.

I am interested in the complexity of human connection and the unseen space that develops between them. Phenomenology, Intersubjectivity, intercorporeality, mirroring, and the in-between are all core themes of my practice, which delve into that.

I have a background in photography, but in recent years I have mainly worked with sculpture and performance. As someone who studies perception, it felt like a logical next step. I think there is a difference between the being in the situation, the seeing of a situation and the telling of a situation. By working with different mediums I can look at the same idea in many ways. The way you work with sculpture is different from the way you work with photography or performance, it forces you to look at whatever you are exploring differently, to express yourself differently. For me photography is quite fast and intuitive, sculpture forces me to slow down and think about materiality and what this means. I recently built a plinth for one of my sculptures, from metal-reinforced cement, showing the reinforcement. Most houses are built with reinforced cement, which holds the cement together, but is invisible, which made me think about the invincible support structure we have in social environments, which made me choose this approach. I would have probably never had that thought process if I hadn’t started to work with sculpture.

Also, the way you perceive a work for the viewer changes, sculptures inhabit a space, and you can walk around it, shift your perspective, with photography isn’t the case.

For me it is like speaking different languages, the message stays the same but how you say it changes.

Are you part of art communities in London or Berlin?

Definitely. I feel incredibly lucky to have grown up in a place like Berlin, which is so unique in so many ways, there was always a sense of community but also of pushing the boundaries of identity is or love or relationships thinking freely and having a strong-headedness, that I feel is a very German thing.

London is a lot more polite, but also funny and brings a very different history, it’s also beautiful which inspires me equally. Also, there are a lot of possibilities in the art scene in London, that Berlin didn’t have at the time when I was leaving, even so I think that has changed recently.

Both places inspire me for different reasons.

You are talking about memory, as in manifestation of histories?

We don't see a naked world. We see a world which has been created through language, concepts and above all, memory. It is a phenomenological truth that perception is an active action driven by intentionality, and thereby our perception of the world becomes diversified.

Yet at the same time, we have mirror neurons in our brain, that are active when we watch someone else doing something as if we were to do it ourselves, we are interconnected.

So we are moving through a world, which we perceive very differently but at the same time, we are somehow interconnected, which I find fascinating.

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I have this ongoing series called ‘Colours We Know No Names for’. I started this during lockdown.

At the time I started wondering about colour. What are colours and more importantly, where are they? When I see the colour red is it inside my head or out?

When I started researching colour I discovered that blue was one of the last pigments that was developed, for the longest time blue as a word or concept did not exist. Scientists believe that humans didn’t start to see blue till after. For example, if you read Homer’s Inferno’ he describes the ocean as red and the sky as brown.

Which made me wonder about perception. How did the sky look before the colour blue and how is our perception of the world changing now?

It’s interesting how new concepts or language can change the way we look at the world.

Can you speak about the research that went into organizing “A Whole Population Housed Inside a Single Body” performed at Copeland Park? I know you are originally from Berlin, but you studied in London.

In ‘A whole population housed inside a single body’ we explored how the influence of new technologies is defining and redefining our realities but also explored how this can work as a mediators between us. I created the work in collaboration with Joshua Woolford, we used to be in the same orbit in Berlin, we knew of each other but we didn’t know each other at the time. We then both moved to London around the same time, to study at the Royal College of Art and become friends.

Copeland Gallery had done an open call for artists in response to the theme ‘body movement’ and Josh and I decided to apply together. We both share many research topics in our work even though our practice is quite different, so it felt like a good fit.

We were interested in the concept of embeddedness at the time. Imagine a pedal in a riverbed. The pedal changes the flow of the river and at the same time becomes smoother through the current.

We also started talking about the notion of a parasite, how ideas or concepts jump from one person to another and grow within them. how boundaries between collective bodies merge and individuality is reimagined.

I think being human is a very bodily experience, to be a body isn’t to be in space but to be of it

Everything moves about each other.

We find elements of others within us and recognise ourselves in others. As part of the performance work, we wore a iPhone as face mask which played a Ai generated video which for the duration of the performance continuously merges and unmerges Joshes in my face. The work is in many ways suggesting a mixing of of each other - a being of ‘ A Whole Population Inside A Single Body’.

“We find elements of others within us and we recognize ourselves in others”.You have very productive working relationships with artists who are also your friends. Can you tell me how this experience has been for you?

The main influence of my work is the people around me. I have been quite fortunate to have met many people along the way who inspire me and who are willing ot work with me I think Josh is a good example, we had created the ‘A Whole Population Housed Inside a Single Body’ partly remotely as we were both travelling at the time, and then had only one week before the performance which spent intensively in the studio together, while the work took shape, we kept taking breaks to check in on each other what this word means both for us together but also individually, we both come from very different walks of life, which affects how we perceive the world but also are being perceived in the world. And through that, I learned so much, I remember before we performed I said to him that even if this isn’t working out I learned so much in the creation that it was worse.

I think my favourite thing about art is that it is a dialogue, it can challenge us and teach us.

I want to talk about the beginning as Junior Art Director for Burberry. How old were you when you joined them?

I started working at Burberry directly when I finished my Master’s at the RCA. But I have worked in art direction before, mainly in Berlin, at Voo Store and Maison Heroine, but also for different musicians. So overall I started working in Art Direction when I was 21.

What was the first project with Burberry?

I think it was a Christmas campaign, we were creating different vignettes to be played in store windows around the world.

With your strong art foundation, was this facility useful as you built your own communication language?

I think having a background in art gives me a unique skill set when working in fashion, on the one hand, having worked as a photographer myself I know what is possible but also working as a conceptual artist helps me when creating a cohesive storyline. I always try to stay true to myself and my beliefs, but, when working commercially, you need to consider the client’s needs as well. But I think that is great, it’s so fun to collaborate with people or do something that you would maybe usually not do. Which then can also feed back into your practice.