The Other Way Around

The title – The Other Way Around – is an understatement. In Anna Vasof’s cinematographic world, what sounds like a harmless reversal of signs turns into a reversal of sociopolitical conditions as we know them. Subversion disguises itself with ease and wit. Nothing here is harmless. Five words are enough to describe Vasof’s cinematic revision: “Acts against the proper way”. It’s a call for revolution, calmly pronounced. Ideally, “proper” gently hints at the upheavals and arguments that Vasof is building a stage for as her artistic interventions turn modern ways of thinking inside out. The illusion machine of cinema turns out to be the “partner in crime” par excellence for this visionary undertaking.  

The main interest of the “object and media manager” (as Drehli Robnik has referred to Anna Vasof) is in societal systems of attribution, the affordance of things. In The Other Way Around, Vasof composes rearrangements of possible relationships between man and machine, objects and animals – a kind of stretching exercise for our imagination and those muscles that cinema helps train. This is usually quite funny while often being more serious than one would like. There is much to be said for her thought experiment that a streaming service will soon switch us off and not the other way around.  

With a wink, Anna Vasof revises the familiar seating arrangements and repeatedly tries out the redistribution of nonsense. That can, and should, definitely be appreciated – but without forgetting that we are about to end up as a fishing rod with a fish attached, and not the other way around. What an image for the grave mankind has dug for itself! What remains is a hope, which Anna Vasof does not suppress in her work: that it is possible for us to turn the tables and consistently think differently. She suggests what it might mean not to be "quite so governed” by the given order. (Gudrun Sommer)

Translation: John Wojtowicz