Break My Heart and Serve Me a Drink – Dear Anushka
Anushka (1981) is a German text-based visual artist living and working in Lisbon. She studied German Literature & Art/Music, with focus on photography. She worked as journalist for various newspapers and radio and many years as assistant stage director for theatre in Berlin.
Dear Anushka’s art breathes life into forgotten objects, offering a voice to their untold tales, emotions, and perspectives. Through the lens of her camera, she immortalizes these narratives and creates powerful installations with words, objects, sound, and photography.
Her ongoing project is tagging discarded mattresses, which are part of the typical street scene across the world. Dear Anushka makes these mattresses her canvas and with her words, spray painted across these mattresses, she releases them from their context, that of being trash. She transforms them to a temporary form of street art. Sometimes her art lasts a few days and sometimes only a few minutes.
“Their bulky rectangular silhouettes in various states of preservation, their often unique covers with beautiful detailed patterns, as well as the places where they are abandoned never fail to amaze me. These everyday objects carry associations. Our lives have rubbed off on them. Sweat, blood, tears and other bodily fluids have become part of their fabric. A mattress is so much more than just a bed we sleep on. We make love in bed, we read in bed, eat in bed, watch TV in bed, dream in bed, talk in bed, cry, and laugh in bed. We’re conceived in bed, born in bed, die in bed. Mattresses are an own little world, our private spaces. I want to give these mattresses a voice. They have so many things to tell.”
