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Yours, KOW

Zen for Hoejabi, 2019

mixed media

In her multimedia installation Zen for Hoejabi, comissioned for SITUATIONS/ Porn, Anna Ehrenstein explores the idea of authenticity and its present-day distribution, commodification and circulation. The work focuses on the everyday use of the religiously connoted hijab, which she has witnessed being used also as a fashion accessory as well as a practical mobile phone holder. Ehrenstein – herself a member of the Albanian diaspora in Germany – deals with this phenomenon and with the increasingly pervasive feature of digital networks, in two 3D-printed busts and two video works looped on Huawei smartphones.

Ehrenstein’s musings on the displacement of meaning and function in cultural objects are complemented by reflections on certain ideas and moral attitudes that are currently in flux – including our understanding of what constitutes an original, an appropriation or an imitation. For this purpose, the artist exhibits lenticular prints of fake goods, with references to ‘busta accounts’, which have emerged in the context of the fashion industry and are used to check the authenticity of branded products illustrated on photographs. The installation‘s central elements ultimately address questions of representation and power relations in the dynamic realm in which cultural identity is forged and definitions are negotiated – processes that increasingly follow a capitalist logic governed by digitally circulating images.

clothing Rags, lenticularprints, 3D printet busts, Huawei phones, plinth
ca. 200 cm x 100 cm x 130 cm
video consisting of two Huawei phone installation, 6:30 min, looped

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Anna Ehrenstein

Anna Ehrenstein works in transdisciplinary artistic practice with an emphasis on research and mediation. She is using print, video, installation, social moments or sculpture to reverberate the intersections and divergences of high and low cultures and their socio-economic and bio-political constitutions. Born in Germany with Albanian heritage and raised between the two cultures, realities and reflections around migration-related visual culture, diasporic narrations, networked images and the class hierarchy of pixels form main foci due to her own intercultural experiences.

She has been awarded with different prizes such as the Talent Award of c/o Berlin in 2020, the Prix Prictet, the NRW.BANK Kunstpreis, the Förderpreis KHM in 2019, the Fondation des Treilles in 2018 and her first ever prize being the Landskrona Portfolio Price in 2017. She has held solo exhibitions at Stadtgalerie, Saarbrücken (2022), Tools for Conviviality, c/o Berlin (2021), Francisco Carolinum, Linz (2021), Gold & Beton, Cologne (2020). Her work has been included in exhibitions at international institutions such as Kunstmuseum Wolgsburg (2022), Kunsthalle Osnabrpck (2022), 6th Ural Industrial Biennial of Contemporary Art, Ekaterinburg (2022), MgbK, Leipzig (2019), Fotomuseum Winterthur (2019), Museum Folkwang, Essen (2018).



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