Issues with my other Half
The title alone promises to reveal some inharmonious details within one’s own personality or self-image. Already in Anna Vasof’s work Amazon Woman (2021) she, as a performer, leaves the terrain of the conducting artist who demonstrates her ideas in animated sequences. The unpleasant loss of controllability of the body is mixed in with the pleasurable and imaginative transformation of everyday objects and processes in order to make tangible the illusion machine of cinema and our sluggish vision. Elements of the body horror genre subtly take hold. Machines take possession over the physical organism, and the figure of Anna Vasof turns into a puppet determined by others, as its individual limbs can be exchanged or even severed at will.
In 23 short scenes, in Issues with my other Half deep-seated fears are visualized as surreal nightmares. Things get really creepy when the upper and lower torso of a woman move separately on two swings, one behind the other. Or when her head mutates into a cellphone on which she scrolls while bent over. Any laughs die down when an arm becomes a baguette that a knife cuts open, or when a hair dryer not only dries the woman’s wet hair, but melts the entire face into a gelatinous surface. At the end, only the upper half of the artist jumps into the water from a wooden boat – she then turns around to look for the lower part of her body. The circle closes both humorously and eerily at the same time: at the beginning, the head in the hourglass symbolizes the irrevocable finitude of physical life; at the end, a modest earthly pleasure leads to symbolic death. Nothing works the way it should or even the way one wants it to – except for the cinematic animation. (Brigitta Burger-Utzer)
Translation: John Wojtowicz
Issues with my other Half
2023
Austria
5 min 30 sec