Anna Perach: “The female body is so messy and bloody”

Tucked away above Gasworks in a studio populated with an array of deceptively kitsch carpet-covered skin suits and monstrous anatomical creatures, Anna Perach has been birthing her most ambitious project to date. Combining a three-act performance with a sprawling set of wearable sculptures and interactive scenery, ‘Holes’ serves up abjection by the bucket (or bath full). Taking the audience on a trippy journey through 17th-century folklore and witch trials, the exhibition promises to engulf its audience before spitting them back out into the 21st century via bodily horror and the birth canal.

Olivia Allen: I see circles and clusters everywhere I look downstairs. Where did the title for ‘Holes’ come from?

Anna Perach: The show has to do a lot with biological processes, with entering points and exit points within the body. It’s not necessarily sexual, it’s about liminal spaces and being in between things, being sucked in and expelled and cycles repeating.

OA: Liminal space reminds me of falling down a rabbit hole. What is your interest in folklore and fantasy?

AP: I was interested in how stories change but archetypes remain the same. Look at Medusa, a woman who was both vilified and a victim. You see these patterns repeat throughout contemporary culture. For example, the wearable sculptures were inspired by the Anatomical Venus, these life-sized dolls used for medical research in the 17th century. But they started getting long hair and looking a bit like sex dolls; their lips are parted, their skin is like wax, and they look quite orgasmic. The female body is so messy and bloody but these Venuses become quite sterile and unreal.

OA: Your work is so inviting but intriguingly monstrous the closer you look. How do you balance the gore and kitschiness?

AP: My motivation is to show what’s under the rug, to expose all the horror of the domestic space. The materials are very warm and appealing, and create this facade of cosiness: to lure you in and make you confront the reality. I grew up in a house with very heavy Soviet aesthetics: a lot of carpets, and I was always interested in the masquerade of the self and how to exaggerate certain things. So why not try to actually wear the carpet yourself? It started as masks, and then it grew to full body pieces. The performance practice kind of came out of that.

OA: How did the performance for ‘Holes’ evolve?

AP: I read a lot of accounts of women accused of being witches and the whole structure of the performance is built from those narratives. Within the performance, the witches become a mixture of surgeons and midwives. There are ideas of birth, re-birth and digestion, the spirits slowly become one organism.

I also looked into Russian avant-garde theatre and the repeated structures within that work, like triangles, circles and other very basic shapes. Working with my movement director, Luigi Ambrosio and sound director, Laima Leyton, we incorporated these shapes into the choreography. Before this period in Russian theatre, scenery was just a flat thing but it evolved into these sculptural installations. The whole room then becomes housing, like a whole character.

OA: Do the wearable sculptures and scenery take on a new life after they’ve been used for a performance?

AP: That goes back to this idea of being in-between and the constant state of potential transformation. The work should stand as an installation but have the potential to be activated. Performances are always site-specific, and the space is kind of an organism as well. It creates an atmosphere. Performance allows us to observe something human at a time when we’re all lonely, it creates a sense of ritual. We all gather together, we watch and there’s an experience that unites us in some way.  Someone cried at a performance and it created this ripple, the group dynamic changed. That’s where the really strong colours come from – I want to overwhelm people in a way.

OA: There’s a sense of immediacy with performance, reactions can be less rational. It’s hard to avoid what you feel when something causes you to react like that.

AP: Exactly. It comes back to the notion that something has to be rational to have value. We see all these structures like our political systems as based on rationale, but they actually activate your emotional responses. That’s how we got Trump. It’s like the very ‘60s idea of sterile conceptual work, where visually it’s very pure. I don’t want that. There’s something within me that feels quite rebellious. I think it’s more fun. Obviously, it has to have layers. I do my research but we can know when a work is good without necessarily understanding it too much. You recognise a lot of things without realising and I started to trust in those processes much more. You don’t need to rationalise it if it works.