The Albanian-German artist Anna Ehrenstein (*1993) investigates forms of knowledge and their construction. Vivid sculptural and virtual installations question networked objects, ideas, communities, and epistemologies in a post-digital and neocolonial world. Through various mediums, including lens-based media, textile, sculpture, installations, social interactions, and writing—with a focus on research and collaboration—she examines how technology and digital-material culture reshape power relations. Ehrenstein adopts what she calls “a precarious assemblage” approach, collaborating extensively with diverse materials and groups, particularly through south-south collaborations, by redistributing global north resources. She believes in critique as an act of love-making and the radical possibilities of spiritual coalition, ritual, neuroplasticity, collective unlearning, and constant renewal.
Born in Germany to Albanian parents with transottoman ancestry—Albanian, Turkish, Kosovar, and Egyptian—she is interested in concepts of creolisation, plasticity, mythology, Islamic & proto-science fiction, as well as critical theory and popular culture. How are phenomena like generalization, exotification, or patronizing perspectives on certain cultural groups embodied, and how do they become corporeal qualities in analog or virtual geographies? How do photographic legacies meander through virtual and physical realities? Documentary conversations are the basis for speculation, and theoretical inquiry is met by urban culture in late capitalist drag. The materialization of intangible data in sculptural form is as much part of her installation process as community and collectivity. Various printing methodologies are combined with digital and physical painting, and sculptural forms of photography emerge in textile assemblages. Through generative A.I., 3D print, multiscreen, or 360° video installations are merged with ceramics, silicone, and epoxy sculptures.
While her mother could access a work visa, her father left Germany after being denied asylum, and the family started anew in Tirana, which resulted in Ehrenstein growing up between Albania and Germany. This biographical peculiarity aroused her interest in the necropolitics of migration and the construction of the Eurasian continent. Anna Ehrenstein studied photography and media art in Germany and attended curatorial courses in Valletta, ML, and Lagos, NG, further augmenting her transdisciplinary artistic practice. From 2023-2024 she was a guest professor in the interdisciplinary MFA program “New Practice in Art and Technology” between TU and UDK Berlin. She currently holds a professorship at the Academy of Visual Arts Leipzig. In 2021, Ehrenstein received the Research Scholarship of the Senate Department for Culture and Europe, Berlin, and in 2020 the C/O Berlin Talent Award for “New Documentary Strategies” with her work Tools for Conviviality. In 2019, she received the DAAD scholarship for a research semester at the UNAL in Bogotá, Colombia. In recent years, she has exhibited at the Ural Biennale in Yekaterinburg, KOW Berlin, the C/O Berlin Foundation, and the Kunstraum Kreuzberg, among others. She lives and works between Berlin, Tirana, and the cloud.
As of October 2024
