Artist: Anna Ehrenstein (with Osiriz33, V.f.V. Braunschweig, Mahube Diseko and Brian Montshiwa)
Exhibition title: Imagined Inevitabilities
Curated by: Benedikt Johannes Seerieder
Venue: Kunstverein Braunschweig, Braunschweig, Germany
Date: December 2, 2023 – February 25, 2024
Photography: all images copyright and courtesy of the artists and Kunstverein Braunschweig
Note: Exhibition’s booklet is available here
For her solo exhibition Imagined Inevitabilities with Osiriz33, V.f.V. Braunschweig, Mahube Diseko and Brian Montshiwa at Kunstverein Braunschweig, ANNA EHRENSTEIN is working with international and local collaborators to develop innovative artworks that question the conditions of our coexistence in the 21st century with impact, wit and urgency. The artist brings together a multitude of voices and protagonists who decisively expand the circle of creative artists.
The first part of the exhibition is dedicated to Ehrenstein’s collaboration with Leonidas Emre Pakkan aka Osiriz33, rapper, artist, main actor and co-author of the series “Hype”, as well as young athletes from the weight training club V.f.V. von 1898 Braunschweig e.V. Since the summer, several workshops have taken place in the art and sports club. These experiences are being incorporated into a new video installation for an alternative national anthem.
Ehrenstein is also presenting the three-channel video work Chommie – digital closet (2022-2023) for the first time, which the artist created together with Brian Montshiwa and Mahube Diseko in Johannesburg (ZA). In an innovative visual language, they focus on LGBTIQA+ rights in a globalized world, in a present dominated by Netflix, social media and internet architecture.
What imagined necessities (“Imagined Inevitabilities”) structure digital and physical realities? How do visibility, discrimination and commercialization relate to each other? Imagined Inevitabilities creates a contact zone that invites an expansive reflection on the current contradictions of diversity and integration discourse, globalization and digital capitalism.
Passdeutscha, 2023 – participatory mediation project and contact zone with Osiriz33 and V.f.V. Braunschweig
For this project, Anna Ehrenstein worked with young athletes who practice weight training as members of the Verein für Volkssport V.f.V. v. 1898 Braunschweig e.V.. These experiences included video recordings of weight training as well as reflection processes led by Ehrenstein on marginalization, the racist background of the German integration and dominant culture discourse and the sharing of experiences of racism. The project also allows members of the two clubs to talk to each other: What actually distinguishes a sports club from an art club? What do they have in common?
Ehrenstein also worked on a song and a music video with Leonidas Emre Pakkan aka OSIRIZ33, rapper, artist, lead actor and co-author of the series “Hype”. The video addresses police violence and the daily racism faced by black and especially Muslim-read people in Germany and counters the German integration discourse with energetic images and robust words of radical diversity, permanent revolt and anti-racism – instead of the national anthem: #kanax4president.
Chommie – the digital closet – queer rights in South Africa, Germany and in virtual space
In 2022, Anna Ehrenstein spent an extended research stay in Johannesburg to work together with Brian Montshiwa and Mahube Diseko. They collaboratively traced the striking tension between the eagerly consumed queerness in the media and the real threat to LGBTIQA+ people. Chommie – the digital closet (2022-2023) quotes in parts the formal language of common reality TV formats, interspersed with South African kwaito music. In some cases, Ehrenstein also uses artificial intelligence (AI) to reflect on the power of algorithms, AI and digitality with regard to the visibility of the global queer community.
A cooperation with the queer center “Onkel Emma” / VSE Braunschweig e.V. is planned for the exhibition at Kunstverein Braunschweig. This will establish an exchange of experiences through art between queer life realities in South Africa and Lower Saxony and discuss how to evaluate the dialectic between the increasing visibility of LGBTIQA+ topics in reality TV and social media in the face of discrimination and commercialization.
Anna Ehrenstein (*1993) is a transdisciplinary and collaborative artist who works between Berlin and Tirana. She studied photography and media art in Dortmund and Cologne and has spent numerous residencies and research stays in Valetta, Lagos, Johannesburg and Bogotá, among others. She teaches in the interdisciplinary Master’s program Design & Computation at the Berlin University of the Arts and the Technical University of Berlin.
In her transdisciplinary artistic practice, Ehrenstein uses photography and video, digital technology and installation, social gatherings or sculptures to reflect on the intersections and contrasts of high and low culture and their socio-political contexts.
Ehrenstein was born in Germany to Albanian parents. While her mother received a work visa, her father left Germany after his asylum application was rejected and started a new life in Tirana. This biographical peculiarity is a starting point for Ehrenstein’s artistic and socio-political interests. Her work traverses material cultures of the periphery and networked visual worlds, incorporating media technology, performance, text and installation.
She works with a variety of groups on collaborative projects and believes in the radical possibilities of collective unlearning.
Her works have been shown at Office Impart, Berlin, the Museum Centquatre Paris, the Lagos Biennale, the Landesmuseum Linz, KOW Berlin, the Kunstmuseum Wolfsburg, or Bazament Art Space, Tirana, among others.
Anna Ehrenstein, Imagined Inevitabilities, 2023. Exhibition view at Kunstverein Braunschweig 2023. Courtesy: the artists, KOW Berlin and Office Impart, Kunstverein Braunschweig. Photo: Stefan Stark
Anna Ehrenstein, Imagined Inevitabilities, 2023. Exhibition view at Kunstverein Braunschweig 2023. Courtesy: the artists, KOW Berlin and Office Impart, Kunstverein Braunschweig. Photo: Stefan Stark
Anna Ehrenstein, Brian Montshiwa, Mahube Diseko, Chommie – the digital closet, 2022-2023. Exhibition view at Kunstverein Braunschweig 2023. Courtesy: the artists, KOW Berlin and Office Impart, Kunstverein Braunschweig Photo: Stefan Stark
Anna Ehrenstein, Imagined Inevitabilities, 2023. Exhibition view at Kunstverein Braunschweig 2023. Courtesy: the artists, KOW Berlin and Office Impart, Kunstverein Braunschweig. Photo: Stefan Stark
Anna Ehrenstein, Imagined Inevitabilities, 2023. Exhibition view at Kunstverein Braunschweig 2023. Courtesy: the artists, KOW Berlin and Office Impart, Kunstverein Braunschweig. Photo: Stefan Stark
Anna Ehrenstein, Imagined Inevitabilities, 2023. Exhibition view at Kunstverein Braunschweig 2023. Courtesy: the artists, KOW Berlin and Office Impart, Kunstverein Braunschweig. Photo: Stefan Stark
Anna Ehrenstein, Imagined Inevitabilities, 2023. Exhibition view at Kunstverein Braunschweig 2023. Courtesy: the artists, KOW Berlin and Office Impart, Kunstverein Braunschweig. Photo: Stefan Stark
Anna Ehrenstein, Imagined Inevitabilities, 2023. Exhibition view at Kunstverein Braunschweig 2023. Courtesy: the artists, KOW Berlin and Office Impart, Kunstverein Braunschweig. Photo: Stefan Stark
Anna Ehrenstein, Imagined Inevitabilities, 2023. Exhibition view at Kunstverein Braunschweig 2023. Courtesy: the artists, KOW Berlin and Office Impart, Kunstverein Braunschweig. Photo: Stefan Stark
Anna Ehrenstein, Imagined Inevitabilities, 2023. Exhibition view at Kunstverein Braunschweig 2023. Courtesy: the artists, KOW Berlin and Office Impart, Kunstverein Braunschweig. Photo: Stefan Stark
Anna Ehrenstein, Chommie Patterns, 2023 (Detail) Exhibition view at Kunstverein Braunschweig 2023. Courtesy: the artist, KOW Berlin and Office Impart, Kunstverein Braunschweig Photo: Stefan Stark
Anna Ehrenstein, Chommie Patterns I + II, 2023 (Detail) Exhibition view at Kunstverein Braunschweig 2023. Courtesy: the artist, KOW Berlin and Office Impart, Kunstverein Braunschweig Photo: Stefan Stark
Anna Ehrenstein, Chommie Patterns I + II, 2023. Exhibition view at Kunstverein Braunschweig 2023. Courtesy: the artist, KOW Berlin and Office Impart, Kunstverein Braunschweig Photo: Stefan Stark
Anna Ehrenstein, Chommie Patterns III, 2023. Exhibition view at Kunstverein Braunschweig 2023. Courtesy: the artist, KOW Berlin and Office Impart, Kunstverein Braunschweig Photo: Stefan Stark
Anna Ehrenstein, Imagined Inevitabilities, 2023. Exhibition view at Kunstverein Braunschweig 2023. Courtesy: the artists, KOW Berlin and Office Impart, Kunstverein Braunschweig. Photo: Stefan Stark
Anna Ehrenstein, Imagined Inevitabilities I – III, 2023. Exhibition view at Kunstverein Braunschweig 2023. Courtesy: the artist, KOW Berlin and Office Impart, Kunstverein Braunschweig. Photo: Stefan Stark
Anna Ehrenstein, Imagined Inevitabilities I – III, 2023. Exhibition view at Kunstverein Braunschweig 2023. Courtesy: the artist, KOW Berlin and Office Impart, Kunstverein Braunschweig. Photo: Stefan Stark
Anna Ehrenstein with Osiriz33 and V.f.V. Braunschweig, Passdeutscha, 2023. Exhibition view at Kunstverein Braunschweig 2023. Courtesy: the artists, KOW Berlin and Office Impart, Kunstverein Braunschweig. Photo: Stefan Stark
Anna Ehrenstein with Osiriz33 and V.f.V. Braunschweig, Passdeutscha, 2023. Exhibition view at Kunstverein Braunschweig 2023. Courtesy: the artists, KOW Berlin and Office Impart, Kunstverein Braunschweig. Photo: Stefan Stark
Anna Ehrenstein with Osiriz33 and V.f.V. Braunschweig, Passdeutscha, 2023. Exhibition view at Kunstverein Braunschweig 2023. Courtesy: the artists, KOW Berlin and Office Impart, Kunstverein Braunschweig. Photo: Stefan Stark
Anna Ehrenstein with Osiriz33 and V.f.V. Braunschweig, Passdeutscha, 2023. Exhibition view at Kunstverein Braunschweig 2023. Courtesy: the artists, KOW Berlin and Office Impart, Kunstverein Braunschweig. Photo: Stefan Stark
Anna Ehrenstein with Osiriz33 and V.f.V. Braunschweig, Passdeutscha, 2023. Exhibition view at Kunstverein Braunschweig 2023. Courtesy: the artists, KOW Berlin and Office Impart, Kunstverein Braunschweig. Photo: Stefan Stark
Anna Ehrenstein with Osiriz33 and V.f.V. Braunschweig, Passdeutscha, 2023. Exhibition view at Kunstverein Braunschweig 2023. Courtesy: the artists, KOW Berlin and Office Impart, Kunstverein Braunschweig. Photo: Stefan Stark
Anna Ehrenstein with Osiriz33 and V.f.V. Braunschweig, Passdeutscha, 2023. Exhibition view at Kunstverein Braunschweig 2023. Courtesy: the artists, KOW Berlin and Office Impart, Kunstverein Braunschweig. Photo: Stefan Stark
Anna Ehrenstein with Osiriz33 and V.f.V. Braunschweig, Passdeutscha, 2023. Exhibition view at Kunstverein Braunschweig 2023. Courtesy: the artists, KOW Berlin and Office Impart, Kunstverein Braunschweig. Photo: Stefan Stark
Anna Ehrenstein with Osiriz33 and V.f.V. Braunschweig, Passdeutscha, 2023. Exhibition view at Kunstverein Braunschweig 2023. Courtesy: the artists, KOW Berlin and Office Impart, Kunstverein Braunschweig. Photo: Stefan Stark
Anna Ehrenstein with Osiriz33 and V.f.V. Braunschweig, Passdeutscha, 2023. Exhibition view at Kunstverein Braunschweig 2023. Courtesy: the artists, KOW Berlin and Office Impart, Kunstverein Braunschweig. Photo: Stefan Stark
Anna Ehrenstein, Imagined Inevitabilities, 2023. Exhibition view at Kunstverein Braunschweig 2023. Courtesy: the artists, KOW Berlin and Office Impart, Kunstverein Braunschweig. Photo: Stefan Stark