Interview with Anita Glesta

16/11/20

Edition 3 of The Flux Review

The impact of Covid-19 on artists. Part 4: artistic responses to the coronavirus and the prescient zeitgeist

16/04/20

Part 4: artistic responses to the coronavirus and the prescient zeitgeist

In the fourth instalment of this five-part essay, comprising conversations with artists around the world, we look at the work artists have made in response to the coronavirus, and the prescient zeitgeist

Unsurprisingly, a lot of art is already beginning to be produced in direct response to the coronavirus. Anita Glesta (b1958, New York) began working on a new film piece, Corona Butterfly, even before New York City – or the rest of the world – was in its current state. In her work, the virus is depicted as an insect or bug that enters and flies through organs in the human body. “The butterfly isn’t beautiful or ugly,” she says, “but it is clearly a presence foreign to the body. It ends its journey in the lungs. I hope that with the juxtaposition of the beauty of the musical passage from Beethoven’s Piano Concerto Number 5 Opus 23 and the lightness of the flight of the butterfly, despite the gravity of its meaning, this work illuminates the paradoxical experience of our shared humanity during this quite terrifying time of crisis.”

Read the rest of part four here

Interview with Anita Glesta at Watershed, Lyttelton Flytower, National Theatre, London

01/10/15

Anita Glesta: Watershed

Lyttelton Flytower, National Theatre, London

22-27 September 2015

As part of the Totally Thames festival, taking place over the month of September and bringing a series of arts and cultural events to London’s riverbanks, the New York artist, Anita Glesta, has brought a mesmerising projection of brightly coloured, circling fish to the National Theatre’s Lyttleton Flytower, visible from across the water, as well as from the popular South Bank and the theatre’s river terrace below. The work has been in development since 2009, when Glesta was asked to make a piece in collaboration with Art_Port and the UN for the COP15 summit on climate change in Copenhagen. In 2013, a previous version of Watershed was projected on the wall of St Patrick’s Basilica in Lower Manhattan during the New Museums Ideas City Festival. This version used carp as its dancers. For the London version, Glesta travelled to Colombia to film the Amazonian pirarucu fish, which is almost on the verge of extinction. She is interested, she says, in using fish for their multipurpose characteristics.

The circling motion is something that appears in a lot of Glesta’s works, often representing women and planets. These metaphorical readings could be carried over to Watershed as well, but the work also functions on a much more literal and didactic level. As Glesta explains: “I would like for this work to be a vehicle of communication, literally like a moving image billboard.” She has carried out a lot of research into climate change and water levels, thinking specifically about the island of Manhattan, floating in the mouth of the ocean. After London, Glesta – a painter by trade, but one who loves this digital medium for its bringing together of painting, sculpture and architecture – is taking the work back to New York, where it will become part of a much larger project. She also hopes to tour it internationally.

Watch the interview here