I first saw Issues with my Other Half in 2022 as a screener for a film festival. Of the 150 films I may have seen that year, this film remained seared in my memory for its inventiveness, its sense of humor, its technical prowess bordering on wizardry and the sheer volume of discreet, original, creative ideas packed into its 5 minutes and 30 seconds. I was impressed and then amazed to find that the festival had chosen not to program Issues with my other Half. But all was well. They had programmed another film by the same artist. She had submitted two.
If you search Anna Vasof on Google, you will find an artist whose output is not only prodigious but widely received. Her work has been shown, performed and/or exhibited at more than 200 festivals and galleries all over Europe, in Asia, the Americas, even Antarctica. [Perhaps you are wondering: that was the Antarctic Film Festival at ABOA, the Finnish Antarctic Research Station in Queen Maud Land.] In short, the woman is huge.
The kinds of films that interest me usually lead me to filmmaker/artists who labor in obscurity, are known to few, are admired by a thin stratum of cognoscenti and are able to squeeze out a piece of film art as time, day job and life permit. Issues with my other Half could easily be mistaken for one such message in a bottle, but tracking it to its source leads to an expanding galaxy of ideas and work exemplifying those ideas and, at its center, an artist pulsing out creations that reveal, amaze and amuse.
After becoming an architect, Vasof went on to study Transmedia Art at the University of Applied Arts in Vienna. As her training in architecture would suggest, Vasof’s skill with things spatial and mechanical is brought to bear in her work with, what she calls, time-based media—film, video and physical mechanisms designed by Vasof to illuminate, muse on and have fun with the concept of illusion that lies at the core of all audiovisual media. Not content with simply using a video camera, Vasof’s curiosity compelled her to know the provenance of thought that gave our world the moving image.
This led her to cinema’s origins, the work of people like Muybridge and Méliès in creating moving images from a rapid sequence of still images coupled with the mind’s willingness to buy into the resulting illusion through a phenomenon called “persistence of vision.” At the heart of this trick is the fact that each still frame must have its motionless fraction of a second to make the illusion work.
Here Vasof’s predilection for analogy took over. She began to rearrange and recombine, taking that single, paused photographic image out of the projector’s gate and transposing its function onto everyday objects. So a door, for instance, with its opening and closing can reveal in increments a visual sequence. In Vasof’s terminology, the door has become a “hyper frame,” and, in her work, analogous variations spin off multifariously.
She plays the engineer prankster in Down to Earth, in which a series of mechanically enhanced pairs of shoes perform Calder-esque whimsies as the feet in them walk or shuffle along. In Anachronism, Vasof, the concept twister, puts a flatscreen digital clock in a vice and, with a coarse file, reduces it to a pile of granules which she then loads into an hourglass. In Wasserwaage, visual punster Vasof attaches two boards to a spirit level and sets it afloat atop the gently undulating surface of a lake.
In Issues with my Other Half, the artist seems intent on having fun, to be the humorist dazzling the viewer with wit, technical prowess and visual vocabulary. If there is a conceptual thrust, it might be Duality—a theme inherent to the physical state of being human or almost anything zoological for that matter. In a rapid fire series of 24 one-liners the logic seems to flow thusly: assuming that there is a this and a that, what if the that were this? Eyes exchange places with mouths. Legs walk away from each other. And, perhaps with a touch of poignancy, body parts change places with or assume the shape of a cell phone —alas, the modern-day contender for our “other half.”
The world and work of Anna Vasof is available online to those seeking signs of intelligent life. (See below.) Happy hunting! G&S
annavasof.net
“Issues with my other Half” may be seen on Vimeo from 9/16-10/16, 2026 via this link: vimeo.com/68840813
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