Anna Mikkola is a Finnish artist living between London, Berlin and Helsinki. Her practice explores, usually through moving image and audiovisual installations, how technologies shape subjectivities, people relationships with the environment, collectivity, and future imaginaries. Her works often engage with porosity, for example, investigating how narratives and materials transform whilst they travel through networks, ecologies and infrastructures. Her recent projects have researched taxonomy and botany as colonial practices that organise nature in particular ways as well as navigated uncertainty and subjectivity within scientific practise particularly in the context of climate modelling.

Anna’s work has been exhibited internationally, among others, at Somerset House, Institute of Contemporary Arts, SPACE, Jupiter Woods (all London), Sonic Acts (Amsterdam), Rewire festival (The Hague), HIAP (Helsinki), Trust (Berlin), L’Inconnue (NYC), INDEX (Stockholm) and FUTURA (Prague). She has given talks, to name a few, at ECAL (Lausanne) and the New Museum (NYC). Her work has been featured in publications such as Elephant magazine, Berlin Art Link, Kaleidoscope and Rhizome. Anna graduated with a MFA from Goldsmiths (London) in 2018 and has been a resident artist at Somerset House Studios since. Previously she co-founded the project space V4ULT in Berlin (2013 – 2015).

During the residency, Anna will explore taxonomy, classification and optimisation as well as uncertainty and subjectivity within scientific research taking as a case study a former Lithuanian astrobotany lab and growing plants from seeds in outerspace. She will continue experimenting with a hybrid moving image-making process which
combines found, original, archival and computer-generated footage as well as animations produced in video game engines. She will also do field recordings and seek within them subjectivities which cannot be algorithmically captured to express a desire to escape optimisation. This research will inform an upcoming video work.

This residency is funded by the Nordic Council of Ministers’ Nordic-Baltic Mobility Programme for Culture.

SODAS 2123 activities are supported by Lithuanian Council for Culture and Vilnius city municipality.