On nuclear pasts
and radiant futures
Logo: SALT.CLAY.ROCK.
Artistic research
and exhibition

Anna Witt

ANNA WITT, born in 1981 in Germany, lives and works in Vienna and Berlin.

Her artistic practice is performative, participatory, and political, working with performative interventions and video installations. She creates situations that reflect on social structures and the political of our everyday in the context of care, labor, class, migration and gender. The body in relation to individual and collective experiences plays a central role in her works. Passers-by in public spaces, or specific groups, - including nurses, factory workers, inhabitants of council housing or members of a youth forum, are drawn into her experimental arrangements, usually in a directly physical way. She creates situations to initiate group decision-making processes, leaving space for individual articulation and improvisation. The performative strategies range from repeated imitation of coded gestures to the development of complex choreographies, emphasizing moments of emancipatory thinking and solidarity.

In the last years, she took part in numerous exhibitions in Austria, Germany and internationally. Her work had been shown at SEMA Seoul Museum of Art; Secession Vienna; 1st Vienna Biennale at MAK; Gallery of Contemporary Art Leipzig; Museum Ludwig, Cologne; Austrian Cultural Forum New York; Kunstmuseum Wolfsburg and at MOCA Museum of Contemporary Art Taipei, among others and she had solo exhibitions at Museum Belvedere 21 Contemporary, Vienna; Kunst Halle Sankt Gallen, and Gallery Tanja Wagner, Berlin, at Marabourparken Museum Stockholm and Stacion – Center for Contemporary Art, Prishtina, Kosovo. She took part in Aichi Triennial 19, 13; Lux/ICA Biennial of Moving Images, London; 6. Berlin Biennale of Contemporary Art and Manifesta 7 in North Italy and is the winner of the Outstanding Artist Award 2020; Otto Mauer Prize 2018; Art Prize ‘Future of Europe’ in 2015; BC21 Art Award in 2013 and Art Prize Columbus Art Foundation in 2008.

Anna Witt has been doing research in the Wendland region, in the village of Gorleben, which has become synonymous with anti-nuclear resistance in Germany. In her performative and video-based work, she focuses on forms of protest and how they are inscribed into the bodies and biography of activists across generations, while also reflecting on forms of solidarity in the anti-nuclear movement and how it has shaped (West) German left-wing protest and politics.