The Albanian-German artist Anna Ehrenstein (*1993) investigates forms of knowledge and their construction. Vivid sculptural and virtual installations question networked objects, ideas, communities and epistemologies in a post-digital and neocolonial world. Through lens-based media, textile, sculpture, installations, social interactions, and writing – with a focus on research and collaboration – she examines how technology and digital-material culture reshape power relations.

Ehrenstein adopts what she calls “a precarious assemblage” approach, collaborating extensively with diverse materials and diverse groups, particularly through south-south collaborations, by way of redistributing global north resources. She believes in critique as an act of love-making and the radical possibilities of spiritual coalition, ritual, neuroplasticity, collective unlearning and constant renewal.

Born in Germany to Albanian parents with trans-Ottoman ancestry: Albanian, Turkish, Kosovar & Egyptian; she is interested in concepts of creolisation, plasticity, mythology, Islamic & proto-science fiction.

Bitches On Their Deen

In “Bitches On Their Deen,” Anna Ehrenstein collaborated with Irvin Cemil Schink, Moenirah Daniels, Mohamed Amjahid, Orhun Mersin, and Keny Chan on a video essay merging art, philosophy, and technology to resurrect early twentieth-century Ottoman amateur erotica from Irvin Cemil Schink’s collection. Through queer gender theories by early Muslim philosophers like Ibn Arabi or Rābiʿa al-ʿAdawiyya al-Qaysiyya and contemporary queer Muslim voices in Berlin and South Africa, the project transcends spaciotemporal and geographic boundaries, reviving historical narratives through contemporary perspectives.

The core methodology employs AI image-to-video technology, transforming static erotica paintings into dynamic, interactive scenes. This rediscovery of a homo-oriental mesh becomes a metaphorical thread connecting disparate moments and denouncing homonationalism. The animated figures challenge normative expectations, embodying the fluidity of gender and desire. The act of animation itself becomes a performative intervention, echoing the performativity of cultural constructs, the animated character, a state of perpetual becoming. Viewers witness the continual transformation of the past, with the characters’ movements reflecting the impermanence of historical narratives and the relationship between an archive and its future friends.