I welcome you to browse my online portfolio! By scrolling you can navigate through a selection of my recent work. Links will take you to complementary sounds and videos.
As I have built this subpage for reviewing work by jury members, it is not adapted for smartphones. If you are browsing my site with your smartphone, you may also see the works on this subpage. |
Should you have questions or need supplementary material, simply drop me a line: [email protected]
And now I invite you to experience, explore and imagine through and with my work! |
A series of radiophonic walks around Pristina. Anna Bromley engages people from Kosova in conversation. Listening closely to the stories they tell, she accompanies her interlocutors along the paths their memories, tirades, reflections and speculations take them.
One person leads her to the next: a filmmaker, a festival director, two musicians and a sound engineer, a philosopher, a stage designer, a cultural journalist, a trans woman and her companion … Talking, giggling, munching and getting lost, they go to the village, to the cinema or to the much-loved restaurant Tiffany, plunging themselves into the past, meandering about in the present, pondering about the future. You can listen to the episodes by visiting this link: https://soundcloud.com/europeannomadicbiennial/sets/a-voice-exists-in-voicing-by |
Scientific and artistic research consultant, accompanying drawings: Michael Fesca
Producer and research coordination: Donjetë Murati Copy-editing: Lily Bromley Mobile audio recordings and electro acoustic sound collages by Anna Bromley The frame narrative was recorded at BBK Media Workshop Berlin. Editing: Michael Fesca and Anna Bromley Audio postproduction: Manfred Miersch, BBK Media Workshop Berlin Concept, texts, and direction: Anna Bromley, 2022 Commissioned by Manifesta 14 Prishtina |
Transistorsargverstärker*in
The centrepiece of the multimedia installation “Transistorsargverstärker*in” (Transistor Coffin Amplifier) is a lightbox that reflects the materialities and dimensions of a display in Berlin’s Technikmuseum. The battereds transistor amplifier on display there served two influential clandestine stations and their illegal, improvised “radio from below” until the late 1970s. In 1980, the device, which was manufactured by a prestigious Milan producer of media electronics was destroyed during the police raid. Today, it is in a museum, in a glass box, like Snow White in her coffin. A recording of a dialogue with the curator of the museum, Bernd Lüke, tells of the media(-political) events and coincidences that brought the artefact there.
Just like Snow White, the silenced transistor amp is in a state of temporarily suppressed vitality: the voices it broadcasts now speak from the past about a future that remains visionary today- A future in which minority dialects, non-normative voices and polyphony are to be heard on mainstream radio. Audio sample: https://soundcloud.com/anna-bromley/anna-bromley-transistorsargverstarkerin-excerpt |
Multimedia installation, 2020
Lightbox (colored fiberboard, linseed oil, LED light system, acrylic), 55.72 x 45 x 29.2 cm, light slide laminated on acrylic, 45 x 55.72cm, base frame: steel, powder-coated, 43 cm, audio dialogue with Bernd Lüke (German Museum of Technology), length 18 min. Installation view: Bärenzwinger Berlin, photo: Sandy Volz. |
Deep Poison
“Deep Poison” explores the speech imagery that narrates the socio-material infrastructures in which bots are embedded. Bots are algorhytmic programmed intelligences that can perform redundant activities at a high level of performance. In doing so, they collect and process large amounts of data, and interact using Deep Learning processes in social media almost indistinguishable from humans.
‘Deep Poison’ explores the hearing of whistleblower and former Google Analytica research director Christopher Wylie in the UK-Parliament in April 2018. Because the legal situation regarding the production and use of bots has been unresolved, Google Analytica could strategically ‘poison’ democratic elections in various countries by means of undetected bot communication. While viewing or listening to the material, graphic notes were created, and based on these, speech fragments were extracted and recombined. The interlaced montage and sound editing of the original recordings brings to life what the Members of Parliament perceived as a speculative narrative and what left them stunned as well as incredulous. Audio sample: https://soundcloud.com/anna-bromley/deep-poison-excerpt |
Audio installation, 2018
5-part original recordings dramolette, voice over by Lulu Obermayer, total length. 8:30 min, score book, office carpet, stool, directional loudspeakers (sound showers). Exhibition views: nGbK Berlin, photos: Sandy Volz, formphase. |
In their radio performance, Anna Bromley and Brandon LaBelle had been following the traces of the hyposubjects, about which anthropologist Timothy Morton wrote enthusiastically in a blog post. Morton describes them as resistant, fluid beings, always in a state of becoming between identities and places. Where are the places in which these future subjectivities would reside?
While LaBelle travels to the peripheries of European cities to look for them, Bromley invites a number of experts for visits in the radio studio, to find out which tangible and intangible environments the hyposubject would generate. For two weeks, “Laugh of the Hypo Subject” was broadcast live every morning from the documenta14 radio studio at SAVVY Contemporary Berlin. After each broadcast, the two artists who alternately made the program, left topological records, or footnotes on the wall next to the radio cabin. Please listen to the two-minute-epilogue on Soundcloud: https://soundcloud.com/anna-bromley/laugh-of-the-hyposubject-the-trailer |
Guests: Kirstin Mertlitsch, Michaela Ott, No Play Work Group, Marina Gržiniz, Vasillis Tsianos, Antje Lind, Anil K. Jain and Zeynep Bulut;
Audio piece as a response to the painting by Kirsi Mikkola, voice over: Lulu Obermayer. wall drawing (Footnote, 07/13/2017): graphite, acrylic, lacquer paint, 650 x 320 cm. Exhibition views: documenta14 Kassel/ Savvy Contemporary Berlin; photos: Sandy Volz, Stefan Müller, Matthias Völzke. |
À corps perdu
Between 1899 and 1914, the jurist Eduard Rosenthal served twice as the rector of
the University in Jena. To regularly receive a selected circle of scholars, such as the philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche and the biologist Ernst Haeckel, he had a spacious rector’s cabinet built in the heart of his private villa. The meetings, as well as stays in the rector’s room were exclusively reserved for male researchers – women were only allowed to clean the room. The preserved wooden interiour, converying a patriarchal scientific culture and aesthetics, served as the background for a restaging of a sequence of the eccentric gestures, with which the philosopher Slavoj Žižek exceeds Western-academic conventions of absolute body control. Citing the setting of a one-on-one talk and employing feminine body presentations, Anna Bromley scans the physical movements of Žižek`s thought and directs attention to the body politics of situated knowledge productions. Please view the performance demo on Vimeo: https://vimeo.com/250412154 |
Site specific performance, 2015
Performers: Anna Bromley and Lulu Obermayer. Video projection, video prompter, conference table and chairs, stage lights; Total performance length: 14 min. Commisioned by the German literatur festival ‘Thüringer Literatur- und Autorentage’ as a respond to the festival contribution of sociologist Hartmut Rosa. Performance views: Villa Rosenthal, Jena, photos: Tina Preißker |
For Occupy Karaoke, the voices of the original speakers from the Occupy Movement were replaced with pauses. During these pauses, visitors can, in accordance with the principles of karaoke, themselves become speakers and participants in this collective virtuosity and hear their speeches being amplified by the choir of voices.
The stage-like karaoke installation addresses the physicality of the act of speaking. In the process, it refers to the technique of the human microphone, widely used at political gatherings in the US. The method involves repeating a speech word by word to the people behind you, thus „amplifying“ the message. Hand signals express approval or disapproval of what is being said. The human microphone came about in the 1970s and has been adopted and refined by the Occupy Movement in New York. It offers an opportunity to circumvent US laws on gatherings, which apply strict conditions to the use of amplifiers. Please view a video sample on Vimeo: https://www.annabromley.com/occupy-karaoke-2013.html |
Lectern with integrated screen,
7 computer controlled video sequences with a total length of 21min., directional loudspeaker (sound shower), boom box, 2 standing mikrophones, 2 TFT screens, silk screen rosetta on vinyl ø 3,50 m. Commissioned by nGbK Berlin; Installation view: nGbK Berlin, photos: Sandy Volz. |