Through different media Anna Stina Rehnström explores several interconnected themes related to both a personal sphere of emotions, moods and memories but also to the political sphere of communal life.
Her works investigate the intersection of subjective life and the cultural community, as a kind of space that allows and promotes certain kinds of expression while at the same time prohibiting others. Rehnström´s works pose questions of existential and political nature. Influenced by humor and notions of social justice and power relations, they position the individual self in relation to her own corruption.
Anna Stina Rehnström primarily work with various forms of film, text and cartoons. The films are often arrangements in which she appears in disguise. She uses digital effects, animations and sounds to process them.
In a series of videos, Rehnström´s films her own face in different iconic settings such as a roller coaster in a Stockholm amusement park, a taxi in Mumbai and the bus in Rio de Janeiro. These investigations of personal life are based on the face as one of the most culturally charged visual symbols of our culture, yet they paradoxically seem to evacuate all individuality by their relentless focus on physiognomy. Instead, they open onto something else: bodily uncanniness and the abyss at the center of our own subjectivity and our increasingly narcissistic culture.
Rehnström has been working with art in cross-boundary and communicative art projects since 1984.
Already as a newly graduated artist she chose to work in the expanded field, which is to say she have actively sought out environments outside of the traditional arenas.
The purpose was to discover new contact areas between art and society, and behind all this there is a pedagogical and democratic motivation which has been guiding her work.
There, the artistic work has a double function – as a work in its own but also as a point of departure for examining societal courses of events, where the encounter with the audience is also a central effect of the artistic process. The presented imageacts as a catalyst for encounters, and initiates processes of knowledge in various directions.
In all Rehntröm´s exhibitions and workshops, this idea of using art in a wider social and pedagogical perspective has played a central role. She has transferred this fundamental principle from her artistic activities also to her work as a project leader.
Together with colleagues, she has created more than thirty different cultural projects in which an extrovert, pedagogical and societal perspective of this kind constitutes the core.
These projects have been realized many times in various contexts. In relation to many of these events they have arranged seminars and debates with invited guests.
CV (PDF)