Statement

Ana Benlloch works with avatar performance art, where participants are engaging with constructed personas, and may take on personas themselves. This interaction could be with digital or corporeal constructs, such as animated versions of people in 3D online worlds; Internet identities used on forums and social networking sites; or live characters still mediated by assumed names and game protocol.

She is interested in the dynamics present in such performance (roles, power, negotiation, hierarchy etc.) and tends to disrupt the power relations between performer and audience, and challenge the boundaries of human/digital, active/passive and embodied/virtual.

Her work explores how technology is affecting everyday relations and desires, from personal relationships to consumption of products and services. There is a growing leakage between physical and digital selves in our experience of subjectivity across mobile communications, the internet and in simulated worlds.

She works with others to create co-authored avatar games and fictionalised worlds, developing collective identities and fluid subjectivities. These often explore the following or setting of rules, instructions and scripts: referencing authoritarian control and consumer brainwashing, but with the possibility of subversive 'hacking' of these codes. Her curatorial practice experiments with similar themes, negotiating development and presentation of work with other artists as part of a collaborative process.