"In the exhibition Ancestral Body, artist Anna Maskava explores the theme of embodied memory, with a particular focus on women’s experiences and the intergenerational transmission of trauma. These experiences are not represented as a documentary narrative, but are instead created as a performative allegory, where Anna’s body becomes the present link in her family history. Through direct and even radical aesthetics, Anna raises awareness about the parallels between subjective personal memory and broader cultural memory in a diverse range of mediums, including photography, video, performance, and objects.

While performance art traditionally centers on the artist’s body, making it inherently anthropocentric, Anna subverts this approach by organically blurring the boundaries between human and non-human beings, emphasizing the agency of the latter. In her work, snakes, snails, hornets, ants, and the organic world as a whole assume performative roles.  Moreover, in Anna’s work, non-human beings are not mere metaphors or symbols of human experiences, as is often the traditional interpretation. Instead, they have their own agency, existing alongside Anna’s body and artistic intention, influencing the temporal and spatial dimensions of the performance. The biological processes of these non-human beings, along with their interactions with the surrounding environment – including Anna’s body – are not controlled or scripted to fit human understanding. Yet, they introduce an organic choreography of their own, highlighting the idea that life itself is performative and there is reciprocity between humans, non-human beings, and the organic and material worlds.

By ensuring that performance intersects with photography, nature with technology, and static images with movement and process, Anna creates hybrid and synthesized art forms. A key example is her use of galvanization, in which copper is applied to organic objects – such as horns and skeletal parts once belonging to animals – to create fetishist and totemic objects imbued with artistic value. This process disrupts traditional human practices and behaviours. Typically, animal horns or skins, when integrated into human environments, are displayed as hunting trophies, symbolizing human mastery and skill, or repurposed as design elements. Anna, however, shifts the focus from the object’s function as a trophy or design piece to its performative potential. By borrowing the horn from the more-than-human world and transforming it into a performative object, Anna alters its “identity”. What was once an organic part of an animal now becomes an active participant in the work of art."

Text by Laine Kristberga