Painting + Printmaking presents a Visiting Artist Lecture by
Anna Ehrenstein
Thursday, February 19 at 3 PM
Murry N. DePillars Building, Fishbowl room 301
1000 W Broad St, Richmond, VA 23220
Anna Ehrenstein (b. 1993, DE/AL) is an interdisciplinary Albanian-German artist working between Berlin, Tirana, and the cloud. Her practice investigates how knowledge and power are constructed under post-digital and neocolonial conditions. Through what she calls precarious assemblages—installations combining video, sculpture, textiles, photography, AI, and social practice—she examines migration, ritual, and belief as material practices that shape collective life, and speculative forms of world-building.
Rooted in her transottoman Turkish, Egyptian, and Albanian heritage and shaped by experiences of displacement, Ehrenstein approaches critique as an act of care. Drawing on critical theory, popular culture, and Islamic speculative cosmologies, her work explores repair beyond nostalgia, experimenting with spiritual coalition, ritual, and collective unlearning. Her projects are often developed through south–south collaborations as a way of redistributing resources and testing provisional forms of living otherwise.
Ehrenstein is Professor of Visual Arts at HGB Leipzig and has previously taught at UdK and TU Berlin’s “New Research in Art and Technology.” Her work has been exhibited internationally, including at the Lagos Biennial, Musée de Joliette, C/O Berlin Foundation, GI NYC, and the Ural Biennale. Her work has been supported through public research funding and institutional commissions and awarded internationally.
Artist Talk Focus
Anna Ehrenstein’s artist talk will focus on her concept of precarious assemblage as both a method and an ethics: a way of working with materials, collaborations, and infrastructures that are unstable, negotiated, and interdependent. She will speak about material memory in her practice—textiles, silicone, cables, and data as carriers of migration, touch, heat, and transmission—and how these hybrid materials mirror diasporic realities. The talk will also touch on how Islamic science fiction and techno-spiritual world-building function as practices of repair in her work, where critique becomes an act of care, ritual, and collective re-imagination rather than dystopian speculation.
