Anna Betbeze

Anna Betbeze’s work explores haptic sensation, combining elements of sculpture, painting, movement, ritual, puppetry, and pedagogy. She considers the ephemerality of lived experience alongside the supposed deathlessness of artistic creation. She lives and works in Los Angeles and is on the faculty at the University of California, Riverside. Anna was invited by STUDIO Director Nica Ross to facilitate her TOUCH Workshop.

TOUCH Workshop w/ Anna Betbeze is a multimodal set of experiments that untangle the ideological orientation of the senses, organized around proprioceptive sensation and arriving at inverted performances. The project builds on the tactile research of Czech polymath Jan Švankmajer, his response to the censorship of his work in the 1970s. With Covid-19 a pervasive reality, touch is limited and vision dominates. How can the tactile imagination respond in the absence of tactile freedom? How do we transfer and transmit feeling, touching those outside of our time-space?

Learn more about Anna’s visit here.