Anna Kiparis: an artist who paints with light

Afisha.London magazine continues its column in which it talks about artists, photographers and performers who deserve attention. The hero of this material is Anna Kiparis, an artist who uses light for her work.

Anna is a Moscow-based artist, lecturer at the British Higher School of Design, MARCH School and London Metropolitan University, participant of the interdisciplinary art-collaboration Compostela Summer Program in Santiago de Compostela, Spain, and one of the lecturers of the international educational platform Artclever, Portland. Anna explores the anthropology of Museum Art and gives lectures on the interaction between Art and everyday life. Anna is invited to many galleries and art groups, where she works with curators in the genre of art installation and uses light as an ingenious element of the exhibition.

For each project, Anna writes an art code, where she makes it a point to establish light as a visual part of the display, emphasizing the idea of the museum itself: art must be seen. In Anna’s works, light works in space as the main visualizer and an independent element that materializes in the form of separate installations; light literally takes on a body, becoming the main operator in the algorithm for perceiving the exhibition. The installation lives its own life in each of the exhibition spaces, entering into a dialogue with the curator’s concept: somewhere it becomes a whole surface, floor, ceiling or wall, acts as a part of the object or covers itself as infographic elements in signboards and numbers of the halls.

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Especially successful are solutions where Anna uses several techniques at once, does not completely duplicate the plane of space with the help of a light grid but angles it, distorting the perception of the scale and proportions of the room; this technique was used in the Fyodor Konyukhov Hall at the 20th anniversary exhibition of the Museum of Modern Art in Moscow.

Anna Kiparis, One and Three Prigov, collaboration with Oleg Voskoboynikov. Photo: Olga Alekseenko

Vladislav Oblasov, chief Moscow anthropologist of light, leading technologist and editor of the Length of the Wave magazine, says about the artist’s work: “Anna defines light as a separate statement for each place with amazing accuracy. Anna’s great achievement as an artist is that her solutions are almost invisible, barely perceptible to the eye, as if they do not belong either to space or the display. Light installations literally take responsibility for the distribution of roles and become invisible companions, a continuous leitmotiv and a pointer that allows you to follow unmistakably from room to room and feel the connection of events located in the common space of culture. Thus, Anna’s concept is that light is time, the material that can capture the dimension in one glance”.

Cover photo: Anna Kiparis, Shadows of the unseen, sculpture by Philip Dontsov, MMOMA, 2019/Olga Alekseenko

Read more:

Lilia Bakanova and Evgenia Makarova: artists who are not afraid to experiment

Olga Sorokina: artist inspired by folklore and nature

Alina Safronova: from the world of pain to the world of art