On the occasion of her first solo show at Arcade Brussels, Anna Barham presents a group of new works made using the language she produces collaboratively with other readers and computer processes in her live production reading groups. Light Swathes Crossing is a video developed from passages from Judith Butler’s Precarious Life and Gustav Flaubert’s descriptions of St Anthony’s hallucinations in the desert in The Temptation of St Anthony. A series of framed works incorporate other texts, materials and images using the psychedelic description of St Anthony’s dissolution of self as a kind of anti-structure.

Alongside the exhibition, our new platform for publications Pete and Repeat will host Barham’s recent book Poisonous Oysters alongside a series of her other publications, editions and works on paper. The physical home of Pete and Repeat in Brussels is a structure designed by Barham as part of her ongoing Crystal Fabric Field project. For Light Swathes Crossing the structure also extends into the front gallery space becoming support for the video and audience.

Anna Barham’s work explores translation, authorship and subjectivity as distributed forms of agency. She uses video, text, print, installation and live events, to create works and situations that consider the audience as further agents in the production and transformation of ‘sense’. Recent projects include To be we to be, Quote-Unquote, Bucharest RO; Liquid Crystal Display, Site Gallery, Sheffield and MIMA, Middlesbrough; A sentence can be ours and ours, Playground Festival, Museum M, Leuven, BE; This is a voice, Wellcome Collection, London and MAAS, Sydney; Secret Surface, K-W, Berlin; and Nouveau Festival: Air de jeu, Centre Pompidou, Paris.

Her work is represented internationally in the public collections that include: Tate, London, UK; Government Art Collection, London, UK; V&A, London, UK; SFMOMA, San Francisco, US; CGAC, Santiago de Compostela, ES.