Anna Kevrel

Anna Kevrel is a photographer born in Latvia who lives and works in Moscow (Russia), specialising in self-portraits. She started out in 2014 taking selfies with her mobile phone, which enabled her to create a large number of images. Self-portraiture is a way for her to express her great creativity and gives her unlimited freedom of expression. Using this tool, she created images with strange, familiar, offbeat or ironic atmospheres. At the time, she was creating atmospheres, but also and above all an exceptional diversity of representations. Anna played with temporality, geography and gender in her creations: she was herself, nobody and everybody all at once. Through these diverse explorations, she focuses on a questioning of the human personality and how each element that surrounds it metamorphoses it. She explores the fluid nature of identity.

It was certainly her fascination with the human being and the desire to create characters and atmospheres that led her to take an interest in theatrical performance the following year. In 2016, she enrolled in a clown and pantomime school, which will have a permanent impact on the way she works and the way her work is presented. During these four years, Anna learned to create grotesque characters, design costumes and acquire basic stage design skills.

Thanks to all her experiences, she pushed the sensitivity of her images even further. She bought a digital camera and decided to hide her face behind a mask. As well as being a great homage to the theater, for Anna, wearing a mask allows the viewer to focus on the subject through the absence of facial features. The mask depersonalized and is more universal. The character becomes a blank page, an anonymous face that is easier and more intuitive for the spectator to identify with, who is then better able to project himself into the work to understand the emotion and feel it in a more personal way.

Today, emotion is central to Anna Kevrel's work. For her, it is the universal language par excellence, a message that everyone has experienced one day and is able to feel and understand, regardless of origin, education, age, gender or any other factor.

His sense of emotion, combined with his acute knowledge of composition and photographic technique, plunges us into environments composed of striking scenes that amplify the emotion of the character portrayed. The décor is not there simply to dress up the image, but plays an active part in creating the emotion. Anna works exclusively from photographs. The artist deploys all her skills in creating her sets, in order to limit her intervention in post-production. It's thanks to her skills in lighting and colour that she succeeds in creating vivid, powerful images. Lighting is a very important part of her work, as it is through lighting that she is able to give her work a high decorative quality and very clear colours.

Her scenographic and theatrical skills are undeniable. She presents us with expressive positions and looks that say it all. At a glance, the character is laid bare before us, his or her emotions exposed, an opportunity to confront the viewer with the universality of human emotions. This bodily expressiveness is a legacy of her training as a clown and mime, both of whom are characters subject to emotions and who have to express them in almost extreme ways to make themselves understood, even if it means verging on the grotesque or ironic.

For her, the human being is the best subject for exploring her favourite themes of self-irony and self-reflection. It is through her fictional characters, unreal but full of emotion, that she manages to touch another person's world through her interests, doubts or moods. By probing herself, she encourages viewers to ask questions about their own feelings, a situation that echoes her personal motto: "never stop exploring yourself".