dESIGN12+ #9: ANNA EHRENSTEIN

03.06.2023 / 13:00 - 14:30

FB Design - MOP2, Aula Design

moderated by Prof. Prof. h.c. Dirk Gebhardt (Dean) 

Anna Ehrenstein lives between Berlin, Tirana, and the Cloud. She works in different media of artistic or curatorial production that investigates how technology and digital-material culture change or maintain power relations. She explores various forms of knowledge and their constructions through South-South collaborations and the redistribution of resources of the Global North. Photography, text, video, installation, performance, and sculpture emerge through collaborative and holistic work in process-based artistic and curatorial research and mediation. How are we as a society produced by media and through lens-based realities? Networked processes are key to unraveling capitalist structures of greed in a world of ongoing crises.

In her talk, Anna Ehrenstein will use case studies from her own practice and texts by various media theorists and critical race scholars to discuss decolonial approaches to collaborative networking and collective "unlearning." There will be a focus on why a multipolar world needs no "white saviors" and conceptual approaches to how social media misunderstands cultural appropriation and how we can move from unproductive dualisms of good and evil into nuanced conversations and dialogues.

Anna Ehrenstein studied photography and media arts in Dortmund and Cologne and attended curatorial courses in Valletta, ML, and Lagos, NG. In 2023 she received the Kunze Foundation Scholarship; in 2022, the Neustartkultur Scholarship for Artistic Mediation; in 2021, the Research Scholarship of the Senate Department for Culture and Europe, Berlin, and in 2020, the C/O Berlin Talent Award 2020 for "New Documentary Strategies" with her collaboration "Tools For Conviviality." She worked for BB10's educational program curated by Gabi Ngcobo and curated exhibitions for the Triennale of Photography in Hamburg, among others. In 2019, she received a DAAD scholarship for a research semester in Bogota, Colombia. In the past year, she has exhibited at the Ural Biennial in Yekaterinburg, the Lagos Biennial in Lagos, KOW Berlin, the C/O Berlin Foundation, and Kunstraum Kreuzberg, among others.

http://annaehrenstein.com/