Aneta Panek

In Residence:
May 3, 2017 - May 31, 2017
Discipline:
Opera, Performance, Video, Installation
Country:
Poland

Aneta Panek was born in Warsaw. She studied art history at the University Paris 4 Sorbonne, where she particularly worked on the questions of transmediality in the arts, the uncanny in media and artistic exchanges between the three countries: France, Germany and Poland. Her documentary My Heaven is Full of Music was enclosed 2011 in the collection of the Museum Yad Vashem in Jerusalem. At present, Aneta Panek lives and works in Berlin, as experimental film-maker. Her work, based on “other knowledge” and artistic research, is about the necessity of visualization and associative speculation in formulating and deconstructing theories and questioning reality. Her particular interests are alchemy, transmutation, subversion, and rebellion as means of self-liberation and self-discovery.

“…I had been a poet up until then, and the reason that I had not been a very good poet was because actually my mind worked in images which I had been trying to translate or describe in words; therefore, when I undertook cinema, I was relieved of the false step of translating images into words, and could work directly so that it was not like discovering a new medium so much as finally coming home into a world whose vocabulary, syntax grammar, was my mother-tongue; which I understood, and thought in, but, like a mute, had never spoken…” – Maya Deren

During her residency at The Watermill Center Aneta Panek is staging Alchemy of Punk (working title), a punk opera she has been developing over three years within the framework of her artistic PhD at the University of Arts, Berlin and Le Fresnoy in Tourcoing, France. Alchemy of Punk is a ground-breaking extravaganza, bringing together the greatest voices of classical opera, punk and industrial rock in an explosive spectacle, melting together theatrical and musical experience, video installation and live performance. Featuring the star soprano Simone Kermes, along with underground diva Mona Mur and the legend of industrial music En Esch (exKMFDM), Japanese butoh dancer Yoriko Maeno, improvisation dancer Meritxell Campos Olivé and many other great luminaries. Through the creation of this visual and musical installation and live performance, she will test the relevancy of her theories and ideas as images on stage. Aneta Panek is interested in challenging the existing norms of performing knowledge.

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