About – Anna Best Archive

the archive website:

Designed as a filing cabinet each file divider represents a project or piece of work, arranged in chronological order by title. Viewers can click on the title of the filing tab and see that work’s documentation as images and descriptive details such as date, duration, context, artefacts, funder, credits etc.

The website is constantly updated and some projects are inaccessible. Please get in touch with me for a password.

the artist:

Wikipedia

Anna’s art practice has a conceptual approach and over time she has employed a large number of techniques and materials, though always underpinned by writing and lens based media. Anna has developed a strong solo studio based practice, her new work is outside of commission or external contexts. She has worked extensively with moving image, (The Tangle 2018, Plastic Water Stone 2019, alongside writing (Limestone Interruptions 2025).

Projects (roughly 1995-2010) were conceived as performance/live experiences, when the event was also a context-specific installation. The audience are within the scene and are part of the work. There is narrative, but it is definitely non linear. She has embraced complexity and invited contingency, explored networks of relationships and layers of collaboration. The foregrounding of process has been a key thread though her practice over the years. The process of production, or of thinking, or conversation. Process in all its time based messiness, with all its surprises and failures. She proposed that these live projects can occupy public space underpinned with the question “When, as opposed to what, is the art?”.

During this period Anna was commissioned by publicly funded art organisations and her aim was to intervene in the institutional agenda (e.g. Occasional Sights – The Photographers Gallery- reinterprets the photograph as an action rather than an image; error 404 – e-2.org- satirises the newly emerging internet as a department store; Mecca – Camden Arts Centre – and The Wedding Project – Tate Modern – explode the Art For All agenda of “outreach”. This way of working was abandoned as it became officially categorised as Socially Engaged, in the UK, and its inbuilt conundrums are elucidated here.

Anna has always been interested in independence from the commercial art market, focussing on engaging in short and long term affiliations and collaborations with other artists, composers, writers, designers… These working relationships combined with curating and organising autonomous artists projects (e.g Shave Artist Workshops 1991-7, Road for the Future 2012, Force 8 2016 and Prospectus 2017). More recently she has explored the unsustainable role of Patron (The Mothership 2016-2022) in her studio in rural Dorset, hosting other artists to make work there. Instead, Anna has been exploring the subject of the Muse as Mr. & Mrs. Berkeley, along with a current studio based practice involving Porcelain ceramics, 16mm film, Animation and large scale ink Drawings.

Aknowledgements

Pete Edwards and e-2.org, Live Art Development Agency, Mark Segal, Katie Murphy, Tessa Bide, Sarah Winch, Graham Shackleton, Nick Berkeley. Thankyou to ALL who have worked with me!