Anna Byskov

Anna Byskov, born in 1984 in Quito (Ecuador), is an Anglo-Danish artist who graduated from Villa Arson in Nice in 2008. She works in performance, engaging both her body and mind along a path of burlesque and madness. Embodying characters that inhabit blurred boundaries between fiction and personal narrative, she takes us to the very edges of the absurd and the incongruous.

Her recent exhibitions include: CRAC Alsace, FABRIKculture (Hégenheim); La Halle aux Bouchers (Vienne); Le Narcissio (Nice); Les Bains-Douches (Alençon); La MABA (Nogent-sur-Marne); Le Cyclop (Milly-la-Forêt); PAC – Printemps de l’Art Contemporain (Marseille); ReActor Festival Performance, Power Station of Art (Shanghai); La Kunsthalle (Mulhouse); Atelier Mondial (Basel); Fondation du Doute (Blois); Openspace (Nancy); FRAC Champagne-Ardenne (Reims).

In 2019, together with five other artists from the Grand Est region, Baden-Württemberg, and the Basel region, she co-founded the collective somebody*ies, whose aim is to strengthen ties between artists and cultural actors in the tri-border area (Germany, Switzerland, and France) and to foster an atmosphere of solidarity. The collective participates in and reflects on questions such as: how can personal work be shifted within a group context? Can group work broaden and reinforce the concepts of individual practice? How can we think, work, live, and function collectively?

“Over the years, Anna Byskov has built up an ever-evolving library of forms and gestures that she uses until satisfaction—or even exhaustion. By experimenting each time with new combinations, she seeks to reach that point of balance where the language created by these various arrangements will perfectly convey her thoughts.”
– Vincent Verlé

“Witch and Viking, Anna Byskov, who took part in the Salon de Montrouge in 2010, does not shy away from the ridiculous, the pathetic, or the tragic, testing the discomfort they provoke and our attempt to reclaim them through humor. In contrast to the minimal action that has dominated the revival of performance in recent years, she would lean rather toward our insatiable foolishness. From the theater of Gombrowicz and Pinter to Monty Python, she explores the mechanisms of failure and the confusion between disgust and desire.”
– Pedro Morais

Proposed Workshops: