As part of her research in residence, Anna has had numerous dialogues with people from migrant or refugee backgrounds. These conversations combined journalistic poetry and art therapy elements, addressing topics such as architecture and politics, the right turn in Europe, landscape and society, nostalgia and community. The centrepiece of the installation "Secret Garden, a first draft" is a travel diary that invites the viewer to immerse themselves in the interconnections of the collected stories. With the help of sculptural objects made of various materials, Anna creates a "mobile garden of rocks", primarily asking how sincere dialogue is even possible in the current state of the world and revealing the ambiguous feeling of limb in the city, where dirt becomes a monumental architectural tool and a metaphor for the transience of an individual's life.

Artist Bio

Anna Rotaenko (1990 Kharkiv - Ukraine)
" In my teens, I moved to Russia and began an artistic career parallel to education, including Rodchenko Art School. Working with conceptual poetics through text, drawing, and engineering are my main tools as an artist. My projects often address the relationship between the hybrid system of the urban landscape and a repressed person within it: a woman, a precarian, a migrant, an artist. I am exploring the potential of documentaries, from using digital and physical readymade to reappropriating and dispossessing mechanisms of ideological machines. By 2022, I had been nominated for awards, participated in exhibitions and biennials, and started teaching. After the beginning of Russia's full-scale war against Ukraine, due to threats and the ethical impossibility of cooperating with institutions supporting the war, I was forced to leave Russia with my partner. Thanks to the artist-at-risk, we came to Germany, adapting to the conditions of war and migration."

photos credits: Francesca Migliorin