#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

Anna Zett (*1983 in Leipzig) is an artist and writer. Across various media she practices as a witness, host and performer of encounters with the unknown in material and historical environments. Rooted in dissident and queer perspectives and informed by cultural theory, filmmaking, dance and group analysis, Zetts creative 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 like the recent collaborative choreography ‚Postsocialist Group Improvisation‘, supported by the Berlin Grant Program for Artistic Research.

Since the release of her first essay films ‚Dinosaur.gif‘ and ‚This Unwieldy Object‘ in 2014, both based on her academic thesis about US-American dinosaur film, Zett’s work has been shown in international contexts of contemporary art, film, performance and discourse – at festivals, self-organized spaces, as well as cultural institutions like Serpentine Gallery London, Whitney Museum New York, Or Gallery Vancouver, Goethe Institut Beijing, Berlinische Gallerie, HKW Berlin.

From 2018, she has been reconnecting with her Eastgerman pre-history, and a research in the GDR Opposition Archive in Berlin initiated a series of works about symbolic and material waste disposal, among them the experimental archive thriller ‚Es gibt keine Angst‘ (2023).

Ann 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 she talks to, the more obscure their projects appear. As the protagonist gets carried away by her own theories, 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. 

Circuit Training, 2016, 12 min
Circuit Training dedicates 12 minutes to the promise of a purely physical language. Visually the video revolves around the boxing ring, a square in fact. The mythical square ring enables two equal bodies to confront each other in a space, where colors, identities and cultural symbols have no meaning at all. Circuit Training juxtaposes this modernist utopia of meaninglessness with the digital utopia of the nervous system, which we can only access through symbolic thinking. The video alternates between states of rest and attention looking to grasp this duality through form and rhythm.

Es gibt keine Angst, 2023, 31 min
A German police state of the past is the setting for the pulsating short film thriller ‚Es gibt keine Angst‘ (Afraid Doesn’t Exist). In it, Anna Zett collages video and audio material from the Berlin Archive of the GDR Opposition, partially taking the perspective of a sensitive child. Based on her own intimate involvement, the artist traces a successful, yet mostly unknown act of resistance at the very end of the GDR, while at the same time opening up an associative space for connecting with experiences of violence that are otherwise difficult to access today. Vocally highly condensed voices from a 1986 East Berlin poetry reading support the voiceless narrator – “an adult child” – in the reconstruction of her own emotional world, as does the multi-layered musical score. From footage of the environmental library to private videos and journalistic material, the film leads to the second occupation of the Stasi headquarters in Berlin-Lichtenberg in September 1990, where it settles into a very different mood.