Geiger, Anna Bella

Anna Bella Geiger (Brazil, 1933) is a multidisciplinary artist and professor at the Escola de Artes Visuais Parque Lage. Her work is characterized by the use of different mediums of communication. In the 1970s, Geiger began incorporating figurative elements into her work, using photo-etching, photomontage, assemblage, collage, sculpture, and video. She is considered one of the pioneers of video art in Latin America. In the early 1990s, she worked with metal cartographies and constructions of iron archive boxes incorporating woven metals and hot wax painting engraved with fire. In addition to painting and engraving, her current work includes video installations. In 2006, Geiger created the installation "Circe," which included a scale model of ancient Egyptian ruins and a video performance; the installation was recreated in 2009 for exhibition in various museums in Brazil. She is considered one of the most solid Brazilian creators of her generation, with notable conceptual proposals, especially after her trip to New York in the 1970s where she came into contact with Vito Acconci and Joseph Beuys. The 1970s thus represent the basic development of two of her major themes that are repeated in proposals where she frequently returns to a certain strategy that could be called "apparent series." It is the formula of representation that she cultivates over the years, through subtle changes, parodied strategies, and which slides into the numerous media that Geiger addresses throughout her career - a very early use of video, drawing, photography, three-dimensional works, collage, appropriation... Physical geography and human geography thus become the excuses that Anna Bella uses to reflect on issues related to colonial politics, cultural stereotypes, exclusions, discourses imposed by hegemony... and, especially, the ways of questioning them through refined, fragile, delicate forms at every step, turning her political objects into poetic objects.