Ann Oren

Selected for AFI'26 by Video-Forum, Neuer Berliner Kunstverein (n.b.k.)

This year’s theme, A Kind of Power, brings together films which explore the ethics of looking, watching and witnessing. In a world where images circulate instantly and visibility can both empower and endanger, how do you navigate the responsibility of looking - and of asking others to look - in your work?
In my work I present my most personal way of looking, playing with exaggeration, creating absurd and fictional reflections on the world as I recognize it. I consider the duality of gaze/performance for both the performer and the viewer, today - if you have a screen you also have a stage. It creates a special intimacy, an imagined intimacy, since screens are both connecting and disconnecting us. As popular technologies are changing our lives and thus our intimate relations, I’m inspired to react to it in different levels of absurdity. I am particularly fascinated by animals' gazes and looking at them to simplify my understanding of our selves.

Please share a list of books, music, films, artworks, thinkers, spaces and places that inspire your practice, and in particular have fed into your thinking around this film.
There are so many artists and thinkers who inspire and move me, but my work rather draws inspiration from everyday life and from encounters with strangers, especially on public transport. I love those realtime human encounters for better or worse.

What new projects or lines of research are currently preoccupying you?
I am working on a new narrative feature film Objet a, a visceral cinematic journey connecting fetish, psilocybin mushrooms and eco-anxiety into a surreal fable on modern intimacies.

What are your reasons for selecting the film?
Ann Oren’s “zoological society” is a simple, hilarious, and yet striking model for the way in which framing and montage guide our gaze and thus the storytelling and our reading and interpretation of a situation. The work at once exemplifies and mocks our own projections and the manipulability of our visual perception. It furthermore hints to the moments when our hierarchical self-understanding within the natural order might be flattened and similarities willingly accepted.

How does the film respond to this year’s AFI theme?
When watching Oren's work, one realizes being a second degree observer - an observer observing another observer observing - and thus being able to develop a better understanding of the processes and power relations inherent in observation and the gaze.

Anna Lena Seiser, Head of Video-Forum, Neuer Berliner Kunstverein (n.b.k.), seiser@nbk.org