Anny Wass
Artist in Residence
Anny Wass, born in Austria in 1983, received her diploma in design and sculpture, as well as in photography. Since graduating, she has built a multidisciplinary practice ranging from object and painting to design and photography, characterized by material investigation and a passion for color and detail. In her digital collages, multiplied object- and scale-up photography, the artist questions the relationship between people and material, cultural, environmental and sustainability topics.
The series of works, in which the artist uses herself as pictorial material and uses multiple images of herself as building blocks, is another crucial part of her work. In these photographic self-presentations, the artist Anny Wass alternates between the roles of object and photographer and documents the performative process. The result is a multi-layered change of perspective between subject and object, human and material, artist and viewer.
Various works by Anny Wass have been exhibited in Austria, Germany, Great Britain, Italy, Poland, Spain, Mexico, the USA, Russia, and China and can be found in a number of private and public collections. Her curatorial work is manifested in the founding of the independent art and exhibition project ‘Dessous’ / www.thedessous.com.
Balance Whale, public installation/posters/stickers/AR, 2024
Anny Wass focused her research and artistic project on whales and blue whales in particular, and realized a public emergency campaign in rainbow colors for blue whales.
It is the largest animal that has ever inhabited the earth – to illustrate this, descriptions often overflow with impressive comparisons: twice as long as a bus, weigh as much as 2,500 people, a heart as big as a small car, a tongue heavier than an elephant. One breath would fill 2,000 balloons and its call is louder than a jet plane. And besides all that, their special role for our ecosystems; Wherever whales live, you can also find a lot of phytoplankton. The microscopic creatures convert around 37 billion tons of CO2 into fresh oxygen every year – that’s the output of 1.7 trillion trees or four Amazon rainforests.
Sadly, the “gentle giant”, also is an universal symbol of the damage that humans cause to nature. Greatly decimated by merciless hunting in the past, the blue
whales are now suffering from fishing, loss of habitat, shipping traffic, noise and ocean pollution. It is currently estimated that there are between 10,000 and 25,000 blue whales worldwide, of which approximately 5,000 to 15,000 have reached full adulthood. For comparison, around 12,000 people live in Seestadt (as of 2024).
Inspired by the latest headlines of various whales acting almost climate-activist like, Anny Wass artistically transformed her fascination into life-size visualization, a memento, a mural-like installation, perfectly embedded into the color scheme of the public area around the lake of Seestadt.
