DA Anna Jensen is a curator, researcher, artist and critic based in Helsinki, Finland, and a postdoctoral researcher at the Estonian Academy of Arts.
Jensen’s approach is site-specific and embodied, grounded in collectivity, friendship, and joy, revisiting notions of the local and global, curating, canon, and politics. Jensen’s dissertation, Encyclopedia of In-Betweenness: An Exploration of a Collective Artistic Research Practice (Aalto University, 2023), presents art as a socially significant phenomenon that is always in a state of becoming and rooted in the idea of art as a continuous process of emergence and transformation. Jensen is co-founder of Porin kulttuurisäätö, an artist-curator collective that has been organising a nomadic Pori Biennial since 2014. Together with Eliisa Suvanto they run a project called Space Invaders, a series of interdisciplinary exhibitions that creatively utilize empty or underused spaces. Jensen also forms the duo How to Life with Andrea Coyotzi Borja, where they use artistic research methods to explore the uncanniness of everyday life.
Jensen’s post doctoral research project, City Is the Thing Bodies and Time Move Through: Concrete Structures of In-Betweenness, studies how environments, architectures, and leisure spaces perform historical layers, and in what ways does the past continue to haunt everyday life in the present. The city of Narva is used as a case study, a concrete lived environment, but also a ghost-like, imaginary place — a city that seems to picture other cities like it: post-industrial, post-utopian, and suspended between past and future and real and symbolic. The city, at the same time ordinary, extraordinary and uncanny, becomes a mirror for larger questions of historical persistence, social entropy and collective imagination. The research questions how is in-betweenness — between languages, cultures, ideologies, and geopolitical positions — lived and experienced in the spatial and communal realities of a border city, and it is conducted within the framework of artistic research and comprises practice-led projects combined alongside theoretical and reflective approaches.