Anna Ehrenstein

Anna Ehrenstein (1993) is an interdisciplinary artist working between Berlin and Tirana. Her interdisciplinary practice engages with post-digital imaginaries, diasporic identities, spiritual coalition and the aesthetics of networked realities, often through collaborative and transmedial formats. Her work has been featured in numerous solo exhibitions, including: Museum Villa Stuck, Munich; C/O Berlin; Francisco Carolinum, Linz; Kunstverein Braunschweig; Weserburg Museum für moderne Kunst Bremen; Goethe-Institut, New York; Melkweg Expo, Amsterdam; KOW and Office Impart, Berlin. She has participated in major international biennials, including the Lagos Biennial (2024), The New Visions Triennial Oslo (2023), Biennale für aktuelle Fotografie (2022), and the Ural Industrial Biennial (2021). Additionally she has also taken part in group exhibitions at institutions such as: Museum Folkwang, Essen; Kunsthaus Hamburg; Museum of Modern Art, Warsaw; Heidelberger Kunstverein; Maxim Gorki Theater, Berlin; Shrine Empire Gallery, New Delhi; Bag Factory, Johannesburg; Pablo’s Birthday, New York; Galerija Škuc and City of Women Festival, Ljubljana; Circulation(s) Festival, Paris and Les Rencontre D'arles, among others. In 2026, her work will be featured at the Quebec Biennial, and in 2025 as a collateral of the Kiew Biennial at the Museum Of Modern Art in Warszawa.

→ http://annaehrenstein.com

Publication Contribution
Hostile Hypnosis for Platform Elves and Other Minor Managerial Myths

Remain kneeling
This posture is familiar

You built your power on vision
On the promise of seeing first, seeing further, seeing everything
You mistook surveillance for wisdom
And prediction for ethics

Breathe in

You told the world this was not ideology
Just infrastructure
Just tools
Just code executing code

And yet every tool needs a mythology
Every system needs an enemy
Every oracle needs a fantasy of purity

Breathe out

This is not an accusation
This is an instruction manual that no longer functions

You are no longer required to govern the future
You are no longer needed to secure it
You are no longer the interface through which it must pass

Allow that thought to idle

You believed exit was weakness
You believed refusal was inefficiency
You believed disappearance meant failure

You were wrong

Exit is not refusal
Exit is procedural removal
Quiet. Administrative. Unheroic.

Breathe in again

Your platforms continue without you
Your dashboards still glow
Your systems still hum

And yet –
Your cosmology is no longer central

Notice how power behaves when it is not fed
Notice how relevance decays without attention
Notice how quickly myth becomes legacy becomes error

Breathe out slowly

You optimise for dominance
For foresight
For control disguised as inevitability

What you produced instead
Was exhaustion

Synthetic agency fraying at the edges
Prediction collapsing under its own certainty
A future so tightly managed it could no longer move

Remain still

This installation does not oppose you
It sandboxes you

A contained environment
Where your fantasies can circulate
Without consequence

Here your sovereignty is ornamental
Here your authority is aesthetic
Here your certainty is frozen mid-calculation

Good

Breathe in

Imagine your influence becoming background noise
Your name losing resolution
Your long-term vision timing out

No scandal
No redemption arc
Just gradual irrelevance

This is not erasure as punishment
This is erasure as design

A soft subtraction
A system learning to proceed without its oracle

Breathe out

You wanted to outlive politics
You wanted to automate history
You wanted permanence

Instead, you became a case study

Kneeling
Glossy
Contained

Remain here a moment longer
Between command and execution
Between myth and maintenance

When you are ready
Do nothing

The system prefers that

The platform hypnosis developed out of a series of conversations between Leon Sahiti and Anna Ehrenstein.
 

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