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Review

Anna Zett

–

in the IBB Video Space

Archival material: Side view of an unrecognisable person turning a page of a burning book.

Anna Zett, Es gibt keine Angst, 2023

© VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn 2023

Anna Zett is an artist and writer. With a practice that is at once analytical and emotional she challenges dominant structures, creating space for open dialogue and personal experience. This has given rise to films, installations, radio plays, texts and live formats such as the recent collaborative research project “Postsocialist Group Improvisation”. Over the last few years, her work has revolved around East German perspectives on resistance.
The Berlinische Galerie is screening her latest video “Es gibt keine Angst” [Afraid Doesn’t Exist] (2023, 31 min.), set in a bygone police state. Zett calls it an “archive thriller”. Based on her own childhood experiences and several months spent working and researching at the Archiv der DDR-Opposition in Berlin, Zett has constructed a short thriller that is both gripping and poetic. It centres on the second occupation of the city’s Stasi headquarters in September 1990, accompanied by a hunger strike. Few are aware today of this act of political self-empowerment. Some footage was shot in the Umweltbibliothek, founded in 1986, an important hub in the network of the grassroots peace and environmental movement in East Berlin.
Anna Zett interweaves images from late GDR counterculture and television with a dense tissue of voices from a poetry cassette recorded in East Berlin in 1986. The associative narrative is embedded within a multi-track collage (composition: Matti Gajek) of improvised and underground music from the period.

The artist

Anna Zett (* Leipzig) lives in Berlin. She studied at Berlin’s Humboldt University, Middlesex University in London and the University of the Arts in Berlin. Her graduation thesis “Monsters of Modernity” laid the thematic foundations for her first films. In 2014 she published her video lecture “Dinosaur.gif”, recorded on a laptop, and her road film/essay “This Unwieldy Object”. Both works deal with dinosaurs as monstrous symbols of colonial and capitalist violence in a United States context. Zett’s videos have been shown at, for example, Forum Expanded/Berlin Film Festival, the Whitney Museum in New York and the Serpentine Gallery Extinction Marathon in London. She published the literary text collection “Artificial Gut Feeling”.

Es gibt keine Angst [Afraid Doesn’t Exist] (2023) – Trailer

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IBB Video Space

Since 2011 the IBB Video Space has been screening artists who work with time-based media. The programme features not only established names in contemporary video art but also up-and-coming artists rarely seen in museums to date. For these, the Berlinische Galerie seeks to facilitate an institutional début. Each screening brings a new encounter with work that raises questions about the medium and about social or political issues. Importance is attached to including marginalised perspectives and to shedding light on the impact of power structures.

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