The exhibition Dis/Enchanted Interiors by Anna Perach, curated by Veronica Caciolli and Valentina Gensini, marks a renewal of the collaboration between MAD Murate Art District, Fondazione Mus.e, and the University Museum System of Florence.
Born in 1985 in Zaporizhzhia (USSR) and raised in Be’er Sheva, Israel, Anna Perach lives and works in London. Her artistic practice revolves around the analysis and reinterpretation of folklore, mythology, and narrative traditions, explored through a gendered perspective.
For the Museum of Anthropology and Ethnology in Florence, commissioned by MAD Murate Art District, the artist created the site-specific work, Mother Tongue. Inspired by the furnishings of her parents’ home, after emigrating from the USSR following the collapse of the communist regime and settling in the desert landscape of southern Israel, Perach’s intervention revisits photographs of her private interiors, characterised by lavish wallpapers and textiles inspired by French and Italian traditions, alongside African masks and Asian porcelain figurines. Such interiors, regarded as symbols of social prestige, evoked imaginaries of wealth and power associated with the West, while also suggesting the privilege of travel, accessible only to a restricted elite due to the limitations imposed by the regime. The Soviet fascination with Western interiors led to the reproduction, within the domestic sphere, of practices of accumulation and display of exotic objects that echoed, on a private scale, the same dynamics of fascination and collecting that informed the work of the ethnographers responsible for the Florentine museum’s collections. Both were shaped by an exoticising nineteenth-century imagination that continued to circulate and take root even beyond Europe until the 1980s.
The work presented at the Museum consists of postcards reproducing photographs of the interiors of Perach’s childhood home. Gathered within a display stand, these images prompt a reflection on identity and memory, connecting the intimate dimension of domestic space with the dynamics of representation and visual consumption typical of tourist culture, encountered by the artist in Florence during the preparation of her exhibition.
In relation to the context of the Anthropological Museum and the nature of its collections, the artist deliberately chose not to integrate her work into the exhibition display. Positioned at the entrance, it remains in a liminal state, on the threshold, without becoming part of the collection. This conscious decision aims to avoid perpetuating any form of exoticisation, which the artist regards as problematic. Placed outside the museum galleries, her intervention thus operates as a critical distancing from the colonial matrix that has historically shaped Western museological practices, as well as the Western gaze and the private sphere.
Anna Perach (1985, Zaporizhzhia, Ukraine) is living and working in London, UK, where she holds an MFA in fine art (distinction) from Goldsmiths, University of London (2020). In 2024 Anna presented an institutional solo show with Gasworks, London, UK. Significant group exhibitions include Material Worlds, Hayward Touring, various locations, UK (2024), The Infinite Woman, La Fondation Carmignac, Porquerolles, Fr (2024), Shamans, Communicate with the invisible, Mart, Trento, IT (2023), Threads, Arnolfini, Bristol, UK (2023) and Unruly bodies, Goldsmiths CCA, London, UK (2023) . Anna was one of the winners of the Hopper prize (2023), The Ingram Prize and the Gilbert Bayes award (both in 2021). Recent publications include The Guardian and Art Newspaper. Her practice explores the relationship between personal and cultural myths, between traditional narratives and female archetypes, investigating how constructions of identity are deeply rooted in folklore and ancient stories. Perach creates hybrid sculptures using techniques related to weaving and tufting (a traditional method for creating handmade textiles and rugs), which interrogate cultural roles, heritage, gender, and subjectivity, and which can be activated in performances.