#151 Anna Zett

Friday, 16 May 2025, 24:00 | midnight—   add to calendar
BABYLON, big cinema hall, Rosa-Luxemburg-Str. 30, Berlin
admission free and open to the public

The artist and writer Anna Zett (*1983 in Leipzig) describes themself as a witness, host and performer of encounters with the unknown. Rooted in dissident and queer perspectives and informed by cultural theory, filmmaking, dance and group analysis, Zett’s artistic practice questions structures of repression, and invites free association and recovery in the present moment. This work results in pulsating videos, experimental radio plays, analytical texts, uncanny objects, tangible installations and participatory live formats, such as the long-term artistic research ‚Postsocialist Group Improvisation‘. Through rhythmic montage and dialogical improvisation, Zett’s videos unfold a unique, non-linear narrative style, that asks the viewer to remain curious about their own thoughts and feelings. Holding on to and letting go of meaning appears to be an environmental and somatic process that can’t be controlled by human beings alone, and certainly not by a single person.

Since the release of their first essay films ‚Dinosaur.gif‘ and ‚This Unwieldy Object‘ in 2014, Zett’s work has been shown in international contexts of contemporary art, film, performance, radio, discourse and education – in self-organized as well as institutional contexts, f.ex. Berlinale Forum Expanded, Serpentine Gallery London, Whitney Museum New York, Or Gallery Vancouver, Goethe Institut Beijing, Berlinische Gallerie, HKW Berlin, EMAF Osnabrück, Deutschlandfunk, Videonale Bonn, HGB Leipzig, Berlin Grant Program for Artistic Research. 

Anna Zett, who is present, shows:

This Unwieldy Object, 2014, 47 min
In the essay film ‚This Unwieldy Object‘ the animated dinosaurs of Hollywood cinema meet the petrified ghosts of colonial science. You follow the protagonist on a road trip into the dusty heart of the USA, where fossil traders, sculptors and paleontologists are trying to reconstruct the plot of natural history. But the more experts and entrepreneurs they listen to, the more obscure their constructions become. As the protagonist gets carried away by their own theories about progress, the screen itself turns into a virtual dig site for unwieldy objects between science and fiction, trauma and entertainment, the remote past and the near future. 

Es gibt keine Angst, 2023, 31 min
In the GDR Opposition Archive in Berlin, Anna Zett traces known and unknown fears of her childhood. The artist interweaves samizdat and archival footage with a stirring collage of underground music from the late GDR (composed by Matti Gajek). Video recordings by activists from the Environmental Library, the New Forum and the punk scene in East Berlin, fragments of the televised revolution, and highly condensed voices from a 1986 poetry cassette combine to create an associative and intimate narrative. In ceaseless escalation, the archive thriller leads to the second occupation of the Berlin Stasi headquarters with hunger strike in September 1990 – a political event that is barely known today despite its far-reaching consequences.