Anna Ehrenstein

Lives and works in Berlin, Germany

Artist statement

My practice is rooted in the fractures of a personal history: my father’s denied asylum in Germany, and my Turkish, Egyptian, and Albanian heritage, which set me moving back and forth between Albania and Germany from an early age. These displacements shaped not only my sense of belonging but also my desire to research the necropolitics and material culture of migration—how lives are regulated through documents, infrastructures, and images, and how communities carve spaces of resilience within those systems. Alongside this, I explore Islamic science fiction and world-building as speculative frameworks for imagining repair and futurity. Through installation, photography, video, and textiles, I trace how technologies and objects embody these entanglements. A hijab becomes both ornament and political screen; a passport morphs into an architecture of exclusion; crypto-mythic sirens emerge to warn of digital economies that drain both resources and bodies. I often work collaboratively, building speculative ecologies that undo photographic power imbalances while emphasizing joy—where postcolonial solidarities and creolised aesthetics unfold as unstable but necessary futures. In my textile practice, fabric is never merely surface—it is memory, migration, and metadata woven into form. LAN cables, silicone, hijabs from Tirana and Berlin, or talismanic embroidery become interfaces of ritual, speculation, and kinship. By activating textiles as both sensual and insurgent, I connect...

Artwork