¬ Anna Ehrenstein
talk back is a site-specific work for feldfuenf's window front and pays homage to the recently deceased African-American feminist, literary scholar, author, and activist bell hooks. Ehrenstein's title talk back refers to Talking Back: Thinking Feminist, Thinking Black (1989), hooks's collection of personal as well as theoretical essays in which she writes, among other things, about her childhood and the productive potential of talking back – as a way of meeting (authority figures) at eye level.
The author of Ain't I A Woman: Black Women and Feminism (1987), All About Love (1999), and many other influential writings, she acknowledged that while a woman's race, political history, social status, and economic worth are each single facets that make up her value to her society, it is only the totality of these factors that allows for a consideration and evaluation of her life. Fragments of an interview between hooks and Black U.S. rapper Lil' Kim, as well as quotes about pop icon Beyoncé, appear in Ehrenstein's work along with images of these same figures – the artist calls it "a monument to Black feminist thought."
talk back
Site-specific production for the window front, 2022
Raised between Germany and Albania, Anna Ehrenstein’s transdisciplinary artistic practice circulates around realities and reflections around migration-related material culture and diasporic narratives. While her mother could access a work visa, her father left Germany after denied asylum and started anew in Tirana. This biographical peculiarity and growing up between the two most distinct societies on what is atm constructed as the European continent, aroused her interest in the necropolitics of migration. The main focus of her work is thinking about the perspective and material culture of the periphery, networked images and ecologies. The materialisation of intangible data and consciousness within circular glitch assemblies is as much part of her installation process as texts and written word. She works with a large number of groups on joint artistic projects and believes in the radical possibilities of collective unlearning.