Prizewinners of Res Artis Residencies

The Casula Power House in Australia will host Zambian artist Anawana Annie Haloba for three months in 2007.

Born in 1978 in Livingstone, Zambia, Annie Anawana Haloba completed a Diploma in Fine Arts at Lusaka’s Evelyn Hone College of Applied Arts and Commerce and recently graduated with a BA (Fine Arts) at the National Academy of Fine Arts in Oslo, Norway. Haloba’s current work focuses on the body and on the implications and experience of mind/body resonance. Lamentations succeeds, through imagery and sound, in creating visceral and psychological effects in the viewer. This video is a development of an earlier performance piece entitled Salt Licked in which the artist used her tongue to produce drawings and maps in salt on brown paper.

Watching Lamentations, the viewer becomes immersed in the act, as the tongue – a muscle both sensuous and sensual, strong yet intensely vulnerable – tears, drags and pulls its way through a thick mass of salt. The action is at once intimate and painful, soft and brutal. It references both sexuality and language – the pain of not being able to integrate, of not being able to communicate through language. The impact of the moving image is exacerbated by the sound track – both etching a drawing in the psyche.