Anna Rotaenko

In addition to making large-scale installations, she works with electronic music, video, and digital imagery. Anna employs personal stories and nonfictional media. Moving towards the general from the particular, she investigates how aesthetic experience mutates within a corrupt society, under conditions of propaganda and alienation.

Here, the boundaries between labor, artistic gestures, and everyday life become blurred. Anna explores the capacity of popular consumer tools and technologies to be recoded in order to create content such as apps, videogames, and so on. Her installations often possess an »inverted« interactivity and complicate the entertainment aspect of visual experience. Moving from one project to the next, Anna analyzes her own experience of vulnerability.

Anna considers herself as a migrating artist, not specifically russian or Ukrainian, due to her experiences with moving. From 2014 to 2022, she lived and worked in Moscow and Kyiv. She was forced to leave Russia after the full-scale invasion of Ukraine began, as the regime of authoritarian dictatorship and military censorship tightened in tandem with these events. Following February 24, Anna ceased cooperation with any organizations in Russia for both economic and political reasons. She does not want to participate in an economy that supports war nor engage in artistic activities within a country attacking her homeland, which is also ethically unacceptable given her family's residence in Ukraine.

Anna's education includes attending the Rodchenko Art School in Moscow from 2016 to 2018, studying in Sergey Bratkov's studio. She had several solo exhibitions, including »Balance / Cage« at Kz gallery online in 2021, »Ringtone« at Vadim Sidur Museum in Moscow, russia in 2020, and »Magic Precautions« at Cité internationale des arts in Paris, France in 2019. In addition, Anna has participated in exhibitions such as »Ostranenie: How to See the World Differently« on the Springs.Video platform online in 2021, The Wrong Biennale in 2019, Inrocks Festival at La Gaite Lyrique in Paris, France in 2018, ELECTRO-MECHANICS XIII International Multimedia Festival in St. Petersburg, russia in 2018, Artagon.IV at Magasins Generaux in Paris, France in 2018, and »Versus« at PinchukArtCentre in Kyiv, Ukraine in 2017.

In 2022 Anna was artist-in-residence at the ZKM | Karlsruhe as part of Artists in Risk ­– A European Network of Safe Havens (AR-ENSH) for politically persecuted artists.