EFA STUDIO PROGRAM: Member Artists
Keren Anavy
I am a multidisciplinary visual artist working in drawing, painting, installation, performance and video. My interdisciplinary process and research-based practice scrutinize issues of the dynamic relationships between nature, culture and sites. I see the landscape as reflecting social and personal narratives, in which the nature function as a cultural agent. My work has been discussed extensively in these contexts in a recent publication: Keren Anavy's Garden of Living Images: Transnational Landscapes as Spaces of Ecological Order, in the Anthology: Transnational Belonging and Female Agency in the Arts, Bloomsbury Publishing, London, UK (2023).
Challenging the boundaries of painting and drawing often as a form of installation, my paintings are the point of departure for large scale site-specific installations and, or performance that operate on an architectural scale. My practice riffs on the built environmental spaces through fragmentation, which have developed around transcultural ideas of belonging, land and memory.
In recent years my research-based practice draw from gardens and water as major artistic themes through which I explore the structuring of different cultural spaces and their liminal borders. The Garden, a central concept in my work, represent cultivated nature and control in western and eastern cultures, while bodies of water like oceans and rivers on the one hand mark boundaries and on the other hand represent wildness, movement and freedom. Water is a central material that I use in my practice, which symbolizes life and mourning in my works.
I seek to undo the dense capsule of landscape-place-environment from a different angle each time. My work address our experience with the natural world; inviting the viewer to reflect on the scene of place and reconsider their own immediate environment in our rapidly changing world.
