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Anna Godzina graduated from the Royal Academy of Fine Arts Antwerp in 2019. The same year, she won the Hugo Roelandt Award, the Mathilde Horlait-Dapsens Foundation Prize, and the STRT Schot Prize. She’s exhibited at MHKA and the Marion De Cannière Gallery Space and had residencies at AAIR Antwerp and the ERGO Collective in Athens, Greece. Even before studying in Antwerp, she had exhibited her work in Moldova, Romania, Poland, and Greece.

Godzina hints at the potential heart of her work in the title of a 2016 performance in Antwerp: I can only see things when I move. It is movement, from the smallest particle, a speck of dust in an empty space, to the data stream entering our homes via a cable and the starry sky – the universe, if you like – that is expanding and whose stars, moons, and planets seem to advance and recede from each other in the gravitational pull of their revolving orbit. Or perhaps it is like the sound of buzzing flies that occasionally hurl themselves against the glass of a window in a room they cannot escape or a walk the artist herself takes through the city, a forest, along the beach, or in a flea market.

She recreates this movement through found objects, e.g. plastic or iron pipes, wheels, lamps, musical instruments, strings, a fallen tree, or a bent piece of wood. She mates the objects to motors, machines, and pumps that bring them back to life, often in a constellation in which they’d never moved or been alluded to by their shape, sound, or original purpose. Godzina wants them to perform something new and unpredictable, or as she puts it in a 2019 interview: ‘If this unpredictable thing moves beautifully or produces a nice sound: great.’

The sound of the objects, their mechanical motion and the machinery propelling them also seem to set the space they occupy in motion. In the aforementioned interview, she also suggests that her work's initial impetus could be traced back to where she grew up: ‘I lived in Chișinău on Belinski Street when I was a teenager. There’s an impressive intersection full of traffic lights at the top of the street. When there’s no traffic, the lights keep changing colour at night, making clicking sounds. Nothing moves except for the changing colours, but you have the impression that something could happen any moment.’

Godzina probes people’s capacity to see movement in her work. The machines’ repetitive sounds also make the space of the room audible. Godzina meticulously and impeccably choreographs the patterns of the objects moving around, their rhythms of trial and error, and their unusual ‘new’ way of life until she has nearly achieved a liminal space between waking and dreaming – a poetic tension – emanating from error or failure, which also interrupts the steady control of the mechanics, but still keeps things in motion in an unexpected way.

Godzina’s work playfully and awkwardly imitates the movement all around us in the external world, at a certain pace, in a tenor hidden or overt, and which can always be found always and everywhere in one way or another. Living in a streamlined world, we seem to conceal all the technical processes we depend upon, tucking them behind insulated walls, into hermetic tubes or slick cables. Using analogue techniques, Godzina exhumes this digital world from obscurity. It’s as though she uses her work to harmonise the vibrations of our physical external world, animating space without having to physically occupy it herself.

For example, in 2019, a few mechanical arms caused loop-shaped cables to dance pirouettes in I Sing the Space Electric/Second Action at Marion De Canière’s gallery in Antwerp. A black and red cable hangs from a similar device in the centre of the room. The cables dance around each other, seemingly longing for elegance, symbiosis and distance with a slightly erotic charge, which you wouldn’t initially expect from a pair of cables. The machine-like sound communicates the futility and helplessness of perpetual motion. It is reminiscent of what Danish writer Olga Ravn describes in her book The Employees: the humanity that speaks through the programmed machines. For Godzina, to err or fail is what makes us human. The second we let go of things, we flourish, participate in the sum of our parts, and may even experience bliss, as in Sound in Space, Space in Movement, one of the pieces that plays on the album Landscape set to Music (Godzina, 2022). You hear it when the composer and musicians do their thing with the sound that starts from an object in the room and when imperfections manifest, for example, in the cellist’s breathing during the recording session.   

In Permafrost, a volume of white plaster beads is moved in a wooden wine crate by a pump. On the surface, the effect is invisible. It is only audible and interferes with the other work in the exhibition space, such as the four arms circling around their axis, which, like the hands of imaginary clocks, seem to each take turns scooping emptiness from the space only to pour it back out or drain it. A little further on, a loop-shaped cable brushes against the strings of an electric guitar hooked up to a small orange amplifier. The technology and mechanics of the objects, motors, and cobbled-together machines are all intensely visible. They invite you to analyse them. And this while we only want to mask that mechanical undertone – the technology that keeps so much of our world running – from our everyday world. When assembling her machines, motors, and found objects, Godzina tests their weight and mobility against gravity. She doesn’t build like an engineer but an artist, musician, or singer, tracking down the mistakes or imperfections by releasing control of the design to create the same poetry that an unexpected encounter or experience on an evening stroll through the city can bring about.

DE