Untitled, from the Series 'Drip By Drip, We Are Fed With Concrete'

Notable Achievements 2023

Crossing the borders of photography, video, sound, and the written word to explore her family's history of migration, movement and their experience of living in the Soviet Union, Anna Sellen's works are eerie repositories of generational fear, silencing and secrecy. Combining original family photographs, diaries and testimony with archival research, images that should contain familiar likenesses are instead distorted, rendered in the negative, with faces removed or replaced. Military imagery and memorabilia is everywhere - in the radio-like device embedded disquietingly in the face of one figure, and in the clocks, and eerily lit cabinet of another work, and the stark, exposed interiors the works are placed in. The imagery of the Soviet Union is so familiar it has become almost trite, but Anna's work demands that we look again, and see past the cliched stock images and abstract associations to recognise the human lives that lie behind it.
A powerful testament to the psychological effects of censor, secrecy and suspicion, these works can be opened up beyond their original subjects to ask both about the long- term effects of a repressive state apparatus, and the haunting unknowability of those closest to us.

Dan Robinson, Programme Leader Photography, Open College of the Arts:

'Anna Sellen's 'Drip by drip, we are fed with concrete' absolutely stunned the Open College of the Arts (OCA) selection panel with its outstanding quality and achievement, as a compelling and innovative physical, online and virtual reality exhibition project — sensitively representing archives, personal histories and geo-politics of the Cold War era.

OCA's distance/online model often sees ambitious final year projects benefit from a 'slow burn' approach to development, collaboration and external engagement that part-time study can enable, but Anna’s final project was of really stand out exceptional quality. Anna has also attracted wide acclaim and recognition: Open Walls Arles selection 2023 (British Journal of Photography / 1854 Media); “sensitivity and imagination… stand out experimental use of archive images” RBSA Photography prize 2023, “striking and immersive” Daylight Photo Awards 2022; Royal Photographic Society international exhibition 2022, Photoworks UK 2022, Shutter Hub Portfolio award 2021). 

We’re absolutely thrilled for Anna as a deserving nominee for the New Blood Art Emerging Art Prize, and she is definitely one to watch!'