Anna Rotaenko

Anna Rotaenko (b. 1990, Kharkiv) is an artist who, in addition to making large-scale installations, works with electronic music, video and digital imagery. She employs personal stories and nonfictional media to investigate how aesthetic experience mutates within a corrupt society and under conditions of propaganda and alienation.

The boundaries between labour, artistic gestures and everyday life become blurred as Rotaenko explores the capacity of popular consumer tools and technologies to be re-coded to create content such as apps, video games and so on. Her installations often possess an “inverted” interactivity and complicate the entertainment aspect of visual experience.

Rotaenko considers herself a migrating artist, not specifically Russian or Ukrainian, due to her experiences of moving. From 2014 to 2022, she lived and worked in Moscow and Kyiv. She was forced to leave Russia after the full-scale invasion of Ukraine began, as the regime of authoritarian dictatorship and military censorship tightened in tandem with these events.

Rotaenko’s education includes the Rodchenko Art School in Moscow from 2016 to 2018, where she studied in Sergey Bratkov’s studio. She has had several solo exhibitions, including “Balance / Cage” at Kz gallery online in 2021, “Ringtone” at Vadim Sidur Museum in Moscow, Russia in 2020, and “Magic Precautions” at Cité internationale des arts in Paris, France in 2019.

Anna Rotaenko was an AR-ENSH Resident at ZKM | Center for Art and Media. The programme is funded by the Creative Europe Programme of the European Union, curated by Perpetuum Mobile (PM) as part of Artists at Risk – A European Network of Safe Havens (AR-ENSH).