Anne Haaning's practice revolves around an interest in digital ontology and myth and usually employs CG animation and video installation. She is currently a research fellow with The Norwegian Artistic Research Programme. Her work has been shown internationally in among other venues: The Jerwood Space, London, Whitechapel Gallery, London, Taipei Contemporary Art Center, the Islandic Biennial: Sequences Vll, CPH:DOX, Kurtzfilmtage Winterhur, Nottingham Contemporary, FACT, Liverpool, CCA, Glasgow International and Jeune Creation, Paris. She was shortlisted for the Jerwood/Film and Video Umbrella Awards and won the Solo Prize at the Spring Exhibition at Charlottenborg Kunsthal in 2014.
Through animated, fleeting and disintegrating images Haaning's work seeks to convey the impermanence of matter and identity in a digital context; she considers the digital as something comparably fluid, infectious and viral as the bacteria that literally enters the human body to breed and subsequently migrate from person to person through bodily fluids. This notion of a digital flow is linked to her interest in ancient myth and its often conspicuously fluid perception of the connections between people, creatures, times and places; the spirit is far from bound by the body and its physical circumstances. In Haaning's work myth is employed as a parallel to the conditions that were introduced with the emergence of the digital world.
Looking at the employment, performance and meaning of technology through a mythical perspective, she tries to unmask, or perhaps re-mask, some of the structures the digital imposes on us. She explores and comments on how production and circulation locks us in a loop of unpaid digital labor, violated privacy, continued human de-skilling, post factual manipulation and other potential traits of Digital Colonialism.
