Anna Ting Möller '23 Presents 'Dirty and Disorderly' at MASS MoCa

What is disgust? Historically, it has been interpreted as an evolutionary mechanism that protects humans from potentially disease-transmitting materials. Art, too, has evolved with Homo sapiens over the millennia—and though amorphous and somewhat indefinable—it has yet to shake its association with the "beautiful." So what do disgust and art have to do with one another?    

Visual Arts alum Anna Ting Möller '23 explores these questions—and more—in a new show at MASS MoCa, Dirty & Disorderly: Contemporary Artists on Disgust, alongside New Red Order and Nguyễn Duy Mạnh. 

Möller crafts unsettling, uncanny sculptures; fleshy and evocative, these vaguely anatomical figures are arranged in contorted, disfigured, and disquietingly limp postures. In Tandem, their 2025 piece commissioned by Riley Yuen for MASS MoCA, is almost figural; the delicate tangle of limb-like forms hanging from the ceiling is reminiscent of an acrobat mid-flight. It is beautiful—and makes one's stomach turn a bit. Held together by an amalgamation of materials, including chicken wire and plaster clay, the sculpture is enlivened by its moist "skin"—made from a Kombucha SCOBY, or Symbiotic Culture of Bacteria and Yeast. 

Möller's work highlights queer, nontraditional kinships—relationships which, historically and continually, have been the targeted subjects of disgust. Much of Möller's work is inspired by a recent trip to China to locate their birth mother, which was ultimately unsuccessful—but they returned with a different mother, a SCOBY mother. Complicating the traditional mother-child dynamic, Möller cares for this "mother"—which is actually an ongoing interaction between species—and in turn, receives a nutritious, probiotic beverage.  

In Möller’s words, “[a] symbiotic culture is… unpredictable and unstable, porous to the whims of its atmosphere. That slippage of control is also an exercise of freedom, a constant surrender to the unknown. My work embraces fragility and transience.”

Slut Station, originally exhibited in the Class of 2023 MFA Thesis Exhibition, fashions 49 x 7 x 5 in. arms from kombucha, nylon, porcelain, and steel. In this title, "Slut" creates a bilingual polysemy; in English, it is a derogatory term for a promiscuous person, but in Swedish, it means "end." Throughout the work, the mist that keeps the SCOBY-skin fresh and lively ceases to spray, and the limbs become dry and ghastly. In this way, the piece references the unstable nature of language, the body, and the relationships we create and maintain using our bodies and our language. 

Williams College graduate student and curatorial fellow Riley Yuen, who curated the exhibition, questions popular understandings of disgust: "[it] is highly subjective and depends on one's life experiences and social conditioning. If disgust is learned, why is it taught?" Disgust has been weaponized extremely effectively as a tool of oppression, used to "other" marginalized communities and reinforce the intertwined hierarchical systems of colonialism, racism, and patriarchy. These histories of disgust come through in Möller's work with their SCOBY "mother," which they nourish with tea and sugar, materials that are deeply embedded in Europe's colonial histories.  

Möller, based in New York and Stockholm, creates work that interrogates societal constructs through attention to the sexualized and grotesque. In symbiosis with their SCOBY, their sculptures/performances/installations explore notions of kinship, materiality, and transformation. They received an MFA with a concentration in installation and expanded practices from the School of the Arts in 2023, and a BFA from Konstfack University, Stockholm in 2018. The recipient of The Here & There Collective's Studio Grant, Möller has exhibited work at Liljevalchs Konsthall, Stockholm; ArkDes, Stockholm; ICPNA, Lima; Jyväskylä Art Museum, Jyväskylä; Gallery Tutu, Brooklyn; and Urban Glass, Brooklyn, among others.

Dirty & Disorderly: Contemporary Artists on Disgust is on view February 1, 2025 – January 4, 2026 at MASS MoCa in North Adams, MA.