Anna Daniell

Anna Daniell (born 1978) works with sculpture, text, film, performance, and photography. She lives and works in Oslo.

Anna Daniell's artwork explores the human importance of art and objects in our time. She creates staged situations between the audience and her art to challenge the accustomed perspective that objects are merely something humans create and use, rather than something that influences, helps, and shapes us.

In the "The Flock of Problems" (2016) project, the artist exhibited six unresolved scientific problems, allowing the audience to engage with the sculptures in a theater-like situation for four and a half minutes, followed by the closure of a theatrical curtain. This project illustrates the way Daniell stages situations, granting the audience the opportunity to step out of the typical audience role and instead engage with the sculptures as equal players. The audience can listen to the items, consider their origins, and the stories they carry.

For her exhibition "SCULPTURE CLUB" (2017) at Podium in Oslo, Daniell invited guests to interact with the sculptures during the exhibition period. For example, she invited anthropologist Thomas Hylland Eriksen to give a lecture to the sculptures. Here, the audience was equated with the sculptures, although the lecture was intended for the sculptures, allowing the audience to participate.

Throughout human history, sculptures and objects have been much more than just things. They have been charged with supernatural powers, the souls of animals and the deceased, and homes of gods. Such objects have been fundamental to communal feelings and identity, protecting us from known and unknown dangers and reminding us of people and situations that no longer exist. As the ideals of the Enlightenment grew, spirituality was replaced by rationality, marginalizing realities beyond human comprehension. However, in Daniell's universe, the subjectivity of objects is not a gruesome experience. Instead, she actively works to push her art beyond narrow art communities and create conversations between art and people, often using humor to engage a wide audience.

Sculptures have the quality to materialize something subjective, such as memory or experience. For example, a sculpture can represent a deceased grandfather, bringing something that no longer exists back into an objective common understanding. In Daniell's practice, the stories with which the sculptures are loaded are partly secret and hidden from the audience, adding an almost subjective interior to the objective outer side of the sculptures. This complexity challenges our rational ideals, linking objects to our emotional dependence on them.

In 2020, the artist completed 15 site-specific sculptures for the Oslo City Hall. In 2019 and 2020, Daniell will participate as a biennial artist at the Oslo Biennale with a large-scale traveling project. In the fall of 2019, she presented a solo exhibition at Kunsthall Trondheim. Daniell is currently working on a permanent artwork produced in collaboration with a research project within biology at the University of Oslo, supported by the Norwegian Research Council.

Recent exhibitions include "Emma & William" at Gallery F15 (2018); "The June Exhibition" at the Artists' Association, Oslo (2018); "The Locals" at Norsk Skulpturbiennale, Vigelandsmuseet (2017); "Sculpture Club," a solo exhibition at Podium, Oslo (2017); "The Flock of Problems," Kabaret der Kunstler, Manifesta 11, Zurich, Artists' House and Stavanger Art Museum (2016); and "Performing the Black Mountain College Archive," Hamburger Bahnhof, Berlin (2015). In 2016, she was one of the finalists for the Sandefjord Art Association's Art Prize. In 2018, Daniell was awarded a two-month work stay at the Norwegian Sculptor Association's studio residence in Berlin. The same year, she received the Civitella Ranieri Foundation's fellowship and spent two months in Civitella Ranieri's castle in Italy with an international group of writers, composers, and visual artists. Daniell holds a master's degree in visual arts from the Oslo Academy of the Arts.