An interview with Anna Malay, curator of the exhibition “Love. From A to Z” and founder of the PRANNA concept bureau

I shared the details of the opening of the exhibition “Love. From A to Z” with you in this post, and now I’d like to introduce you to its curator – Anna Malay.

How did you choose the artists for this project? Was there an open call, or did you invite them personally? If the latter, how did those artists become “visible” to you? If you can give specific examples of a few artists’ stories, that would be wonderful.

This time we didn’t announce an open call — I invited the artists personally and selected them on recommendation.

While the exhibition was being prepared I talked with a great many curators, artists and people from the art world. Those who responded to the theme of the planned project, or who had been working on it for a long time, sent me their portfolios or recommended others.

That’s how we put together the group of artists with whom we developed the projects for “Love. From A to Z” from scratch.

It’s obviously very hard to describe briefly, and without generalities, which criteria are decisive when you choose artists and works — but still: in your view, what are the key elements of strong art? What should emerging artists focus on?

Strong art is art that changes you, that resonates emotionally and through the senses, that carries hope and even love in it without ignoring objectivity — art that is able to encapsulate more data about cultural experience.

Weak art is art with no love in it.

This is often perceived very individually. For young artists it is probably even more important to give attention to continuous practice, to the search for a signature of their own and for the semantic core of the directions they want to devote their practice to, and to inner work with their beliefs and motives.

We’re seeing more and more projects that work deliberately with the viewer’s experience. Your project became a full immersion with a multi-layered narrative. What tools produce that effect? And how important is it for a contemporary artist to take the viewer’s experience into account while making work?

The viewer’s experience is probably the most important thing of all.

It’s genuinely hard to make art without thinking about what the viewer feels. I think a mature artist always has some idea of the effect, the emotions and the thoughts their work will produce. When you exhibit art and offer it up for dialogue, it’s important not only to be aware of its impact but to treat the viewer’s emotions with care. If someone has come to an exhibition and chosen to explore a subject as delicate and intimate as love, they have effectively placed their trust in the artist — and the artist, simply by stepping into a public field of meaning and information, carries an ethical responsibility to the viewer and to society for their work, their thoughts and their intentions.

As for the tools, the main ones are of course empathy, an understanding of how interconnected and even interdependent different processes are, and constantly checking in — with yourself, with the professionals on the team and with the audience.

You need a kind of dialogue in which you also ask yourself critical questions about your work, your intentions, your motives and your aims, and take on board the feedback from the people receiving it.

By understanding deeply the nature of their own feelings and those of other people, an artist can create a chance to see the ways out of the maze of difficult questions, rather than leading the viewer into the dead end of their own limitations. Then the viewer feels they are in dialogue with the artist, and not simply caught inside someone else’s creative imagination with no way to affect it.

What advice would you give to emerging artists?

To emerging artists I’d wish persistence and inspiration, a drive to keep developing, and confidence in their own powers.