Anna Ehrenstein, with Lux Venérea and Jonathan Omer Mizrahi: The Nation State as Instagram Influencer

 

 

The Nation State as Instagram Influencer stitches together three different accounts of state- sponsored nationalism on the internet. A first section sees Ehrenstein and her grandparents repeating affirmations of supposed “EU values”, disseminated by EU agencies and initiatives, for example by paying young Albanians to talk about them on Instagram as something to aspire to. A second section presents a persiflage lip sync by artist Lux Venérea of Jair Bolsonaro’s anti- LGBTQI+ and anti-PT-ism propaganda spread via purchased WhatsApp chain messages. And a third section deals with the pink- and vegan-washing of the Israeli state through a travel vlog from the perspective of Jonatan Omer Mizrahi, as he travels to an ecological Israeli winery and artist residency in the occupied Westbank. Influencers are invited to share state sponsored and orchestrated holidays, promoting gay-friendliness and ecological interests to distract from the brutal systematic oppression of Palestinians.

All three parts are scripted by each author individually and amplify the ridiculous, sometimes amateurish and immediately outdated-feeling forms these psyops take, portraying the nation-state as manipulative and crafty. (Text: Felix Ansmann)

 

Anna Ehrenstein lives between Berlin, Tirana and the cloud and works in various mediums in artistic or curatorial production, examining how technology and digital-material culture reshape power relations. She investigates varying forms of knowledge and their constructions through south-south collaborations and redistribution of global north resources. Photography, Text, Video, Installation, Performance and Sculpture are created through working in community and throughout process-based artistic and curatorial research and mediation. How are we as a society produced by the media and through lens-based realities? Networked processes are key in untangling capitalistic structures of greed in a world of ongoing crises.

Anna Ehrenstein studied photography and media art in Germany and attended curatorial courses in Valetta, ML and Lagos, NG. In 2022 she received the INITIAL scholarship for artistic mediation, in 2021 the Research Scholarship of the Senate Department for Culture and Europe, Berlin and in 2020 the C/O Berlin Talent Award 2020 for “New Documentary Strategies” with her collaboration “Tools for Conviviality”. She worked for the educational program of BB10 curated by Gabi Ngcobo and curated exhibitions for the Triennale of photography in Hamburg, amongst others. In 2019 she received a DAAD scholarship for a research semester in Bogota, Colombia. In the past year she has exhibited at the Ural Industrial Biennale in Yekaterinburg, the Lagos Biennale in Lagos and at KOW Berlin, the C/O Berlin Foundation and the Kunstraum Kreuzberg, among others.

https://annaehrenstein.com/