In the project Sehnsucht [Yearning], Anselment investigates the different meanings that images produce in peoples’ heads. Her two video films, which show fixed shots of deserts and seas, invoke for many viewers associations with vacation, freedom, adventure, infinitude, inspiration, and tranquility. The television photos of refugees arrested at sea or in the desert presented simultaneously in the installation disclose, in contrast, the elemental vulnerability and helplessness of the people involved and make clear once again how different the meaning of concepts and their affiliated images can be. In this way Anselment expands the narrative potential of images and explores in the interstices of visual conventions. Her images bring together associatively life realities that one almost never encounters in the empirical world.
Dr. Ralf F. Hartmann / Magdala Perpinyà
Translated by Tom Lampert