Anne Bean has undertaken numerous solo and collaborative projects worldwide in a range of media from light and sound to performance, sculpture and drawing. Born in Zambia and resident in the UK, she studied Fine Art at Cape Town and Reading Universities and made her first performance work outside Africa in 1970.
Her performance was carried out with irresistible conviction and honesty without reserve, temporarily closing the performer/audience gap to a millimeter breadth. I was riveted and so was almost everyone else.
Performance Magazine
Anne has twice been awarded the Time Out Award for performance art, once for her long-standing contribution to live art and then as a founder member of the legendary Bow Gamelan Ensemble with Paul Burwell and Richard Wilson:
They serve up adventures in music, sculpture and performance that dazzle the eyes, astonish the ears and stimulate the imagination of viewers with unorthodox magic.
She travels constantly and extensively for her work. In 2007, she was the International Fellow at Franklin Furnace Archives, New York and in Summer 2008 she visited Croatia and Kurdistan-Iraq where she worked with local people to develop and create performances and installations referencing their recent history.
In an essay commissioned for Anne’s publication Autobituary (2006), the art critic and curator Guy Brett wrote :
“Reading Anne Bean’s CV is like following a continuous performance, a continuous response to the world….. a “magification” of the world. The panoply of places she has worked, times of the day or night, interiors, exteriors seasons, publics, materials, concepts, tools, is astonishing: all shifting but all attuned to unique situations.”
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365 Dresses, Southwark, Park 2005. (Photo by Chris Bishop) 
Painings and Rawings, Art in Time, Cardiff, 2007. (Photo by Tim Freeman & Matt Skelly) 
Crack, Power Plant, Liverpool, 2007. (Photo by Chris Bishop)