Anna Ehrenstein

Anna Ehrenstein works across various media—from photography and sculpture to social interactions and writing—focusing on research and collaboration. Her work explores the material culture of the periphery, networked images, and ecological dynamics in a world of prosumption. The materialization of intangible data is central to her installations, which are deeply rooted in community and collectivity. She employs a “precarious assemblage” approach, emphasizing collaboration, particularly in South-South alliances. Born in Germany to Albanian parents with trans-Ottoman ancestry (including Albanian, Turkish, Kosovar, and Egyptian heritage), she is interested in concepts like plasticity and Islamic science-fiction. Her family’s migration experiences shaped her curiosity about the necropolitics of migration and the formation of the Eurasian continent. She studied media art, photography and curation and has held two professorships so far.

Anna Ehrenstein’s work cycle is as much an ode to the muslim femme cyborg as it is auto-biographical, sparked by the delusion of solidarity through networked protest in the West after the Iranian‚Woman, life, freedom!‘ demonstrations in 2022. The symbol of the veil is often employed in her work as a metaphoric screen for the political projections muslim femmes reflect back towards multiple patriarchies. Part of her research on mediarchies and the processes of “mattering”, that fold matter upon meaning within our ever more intensely medialized societies, she juxtaposes imagery from 18th century orientalist painting with photographs used to justify Western imperialism in Algeria and Afghanistan with talisman imagery of Fatima al-Fihri (the founder of the worlds oldest university in Morroco in the 12th century) to entropic lenticular artworks.

The short video work looped within the hijabs Iphone traces the historical roots of algorithmic constructions of power and contrasts it with Ibn Arabis queer gender ideals.

The works from the 'A Lotus is a Lotus' series explore the embodiment of cultural exotification in virtual and physical objects. Rooted in research on Western consumption desires, which is materialised in embroidered fake luxury textiles.

'Doom Scroll Djinn' Tapestry emerges from where the digital phantasmagoria meets material ruins of devotion. Here, prayer rugs collected on markets in Cairo—once stable coordinates in a spiritual geography—are cut, spliced, and re-stitched into patchworks; assembled as a palimpsest of displacement, their fractured surfaces bearing witness to the violence of circulation: the algorithmic, the colonial, the market-driven. The stitching, binding torn surfaces, becomes a gesture of counter-memory, of care.