Ana Teles is an artist working with painting, photography, and performance. Her work is concerned with invisibility, the conditions of art-making and artistic identity. Her painting and photography engage the provisional and the gestural mark, approached through tools and processes that resist control and sabotage technical mastery. Her performance-based work, which includes copying the paintings of other artists in collaboration with them, working in the languages of other artists, and staging her own funeral, considers how authorship and identity are perceived and transferred.
Her practice-based PhD at the University of the Arts London investigated the copying of other artists’ paintings in collaboration with the artists themselves. It asked how the original artist’s participation shapes the resulting copy, not only in its aesthetic qualities but in its ontological status: its standing and reception within the art world. Alongside her artistic practice, she has exhibited in the UK and internationally and has developed projects, exhibitions and public programmes that connect artistic research, curatorial practice, and contemporary debates in art.
Image: Nikolai as Ana as Nikolai, 2014, Nikolai Ishchuk.