2019

ANNA-SOPHIE BERGER “SHE VANISHED 1” AND “FOUR SEASONS”

Anna-Sophie Berger studied fashion design with Bernhard Willhelm and transmedia art at the University of Applied Arts in Vienna. Already her academic formation situates her and her work in a liminal zone where art, fashion, performance, photography and text coexist. Her fashion-related work, like the collection “Fashion is Fast”, for instance, cannot be fully addressed without knowing about her art practice, and her art practice gains a different level of appreciation and comprehension only after reading her writings. 
Approaching Anna-Sophie Berger’s work requires patience to navigate a slippery terrain where nothing fits clearly into conventional or rigid categories. Instead of asking “Is it art or fashion?”, her work prompts more subtle reflections on the meaning an object can have when presented in different contexts. White silk shirt, blue wool coat, green soft-shell jacket… they can all belong to a spring/summer or autumn/winter collection, but when a title such as “She Vanished 1” or “Four Seasons” is given to each, a garment acquires new semantic connotations. It becomes a vehicle for a narrative, enhanced by how it is displayed: simply hanging on the wall or lying on the floor, soaked in water. 
What might be taken for a garment, a product, a part of fashion production/promotion chain, becomes something unique, not just because it’s not serially produced, but also because it’s charged with narrative allusions: it could have been part of somebody's wardrobe, somebody's life… or it could become an only trace of an existence we can wonder about. 
But then, all the above-mentioned elements, which gained the status of an artwork at the moment they received the title, the price, and the placement in the art gallery, can again become just clothes, be worn, used, mass-produced, and commercialised. 
These are potentials and ambiguities in front of which the work of Anna-Sophie Berger places us, demanding a choice: to continue to think in binary terms, art/fashion, or imagine new forms of defining and categorising things and concepts which are made through a transdisciplinary process of conceiving and producing, so common to the generation which epitomises an era of post-disciplinarity.