Anna Usadi

Anna Usadi (born in 1997) is a visual artist based in London. She is currently studying on the Graduate Diploma in Art at Goldsmiths. Her practice utilises a range of media, including sculpture, drawing, text, sound and moving image. Deeply concerned with human-induced ecological and geological trauma, Usadi’s practice interrogates human ideologies that have had a negative effect on the planet.

These ideas include notions of superiority (over 'othered' people and the non-human world), identity (race, class, gender), linear time and progress. Drawing on speculative fiction, she aims to disrupt and depart from these prevalent constructs, proposing world-building as a means of exploring alternative ways of being. Usadi’s works depict speculative scenarios and non-human inspired characters which challenge anthropocentricism and introduce alternative ways of thinking about the world. By generating non-human narratives, whether through the lens of an artificial intelligence network, non-human life or minerals, the artist aims to draw attention to the importance of non-human perspectives. Interested in challenging human tendencies to categorise and ‘other’, Usadi’s works often draw on cyborg theory and the phenomenon of quantum entanglement, confusing the boundaries between human and non-human, natural and artificial, and real and fictional.

Our Time-Keepers

This piece explores the effects of human notions of progress and productivity and the development of time-keeping technology on the planet. Viewers are invited to ask the question ‘what is time?’, and to consider how non-human notions of time might differ from our own. Shells of an extinct species are imagined as a future artificial intelligence mourns the ecological loss of molluscs due to shell damage from acidic waters. The AI network questions their understanding of time and turns to molluscs for a new understanding of time, as the ridges on their shells used to denote a year in human time, but no longer do due to climate change.

Our Time-Keepers

tower computer parts, paint, sand, speakers,

two-channel sound installation

Size variable (60 x 200 x 250 cm as pictured)

2023

£1400

(Individual ceramics £150 - £350)