I like things to be playful and candidly childlike yet earnest and uncannily sticky.

Working across different media such as painting, print, sculpture and video, my practice is fundamentally performative. I often perform as non-human creatures scrutinising norms of social behaviour. For example, most recently, I appeared as a halo-lit ‘vlogging’ pig desperately posing, dancing and mumbling to herself on a screen during the live performance ‘EMOPIG91 has feelings too’ (London, 2021).

The core of my practice dwells on mixed feelings I experience in a society that is not quite sure how to feel OK with not being OK. Rather than avoiding the uncomfortable, I bring suppressed thoughts and feelings to a painted or performed surface; not to be all doom and gloom, but to celebrate awkwardness and use shame as a tool for connection and recognition. I truly like to think that my audience can find themselves in my work —if only they dare to take a real look, at the work and themselves. As psychoanalyst DW Winnicott puts it: “It is a joy to be hidden, but a disaster not to be found”.

Anna Frijstein (Huizen, 1991) obtained her MA from the Royal College of Art in London in 2019 where she currently lives and works after graduating from the Gerrit Rietveld Academie in Amsterdam in 2015. In 2021 she received the Mondriaan Young Talent grant.