Sixty Minutes Smiling

  • Sixty Minutes Smiling, 2014

In this video work, you see a group of people officially dressed, standing and smiling.Statically posing, they look at the viewer with a constant smile throughout the entirety of the 60-minute film. When will we smile like them? What do you associate with their ages and outfits?
it must be hard to keep the same pose and smile for 60 minutes dressed so formally. You see them having difficulties staying still as time goes by. They keep on smiling, but are they really really happy? Whom do they represent? Are they smiling from their hearts, or was it an order?

Work by the artist is also shown at the following space:
  - T05 Toyota Citizens' Gallery

Anna WITT

  • Born 1981 in Wasserburg am Inn, Germany
  • Based in Vienna, Austria

Anna Witt is interested in people from a wide range of social strata, and brings these people into the performance and video installation work that she creates. Members of the community, whether that be a region or a business, and passersby appear in her video work. In Sixty Minutes Smiling, people who resemble the typical employee of the company maintained their professional smiles for 60 minutes. With Care, another of her works, the movements of those providing and receiving nursing care, in an aging region, were transformed into a group dance performance. Witt questions the meaning of human autonomy by making visible the social systems created by the logic of politics and economics, and emphasizing the movement of the human body, which carries those.

Selected Works & Awards

2018 Unexpected Encounters-Artist in Residence Maebashi 2015-2018, Arts Maebashi, Gunma, Japan
2018 Human Flag (solo), Museum Belvedere 21, Vienna, Austria
2010 6th Berlin Biennale for Contemporary Art, What is waiting out there, Berlin, Germany
2008 Manifesta7, Principle Hope, Rovereto, Italy

Map

Aichi Prefectural Museum of Art (10F)

Address

Aichi Arts Center 10F
1-13-2 Higashisakura,Higashi-ku, Nagoya
461-8525 JAPAN

Open

10:00-18:00
(Fri -20:00)
Admission until
30 minutes
before closing

Closed

Mondays (Except for National Holidays)

Barrier free

Free rental of wheelchairs.Please request to information.

Access

・5 minutes on foot from Sakae Station on the Higashiyama Subway Line or Meijo Subway Line.
・5 minutes on foot from Sakae-Machi Station on the Meitetsu Seto Line.

Inquiries

+81-52-971-6111