Kunsthaus Bregenz

Over the summer months, the Kunsthaus Bregenz is presenting works by Anna Jermolaewa. The KUB is closely associated with the artist—Austria’s next Venice Biennale participant—as several of her main works are part of the Kunsthaus Bregenz collection.

“We are delighted to offer our audience a foretaste of the 2024 Venice Biennale already this summer with a showing of important works by Anna Jermolaewa from our collection,” announced KUB Director Thomas D. Trummer.

The Kunsthaus Bregenz is closely associated with the artist. In recent years, several of her main works have been acquired for the KUB collection. One of them is Chernobyl Safari, a highly topical piece about the wildlife in the contaminated zone of Chernobyl. In 2014 and again in 2021, Jermolaewa went on a photo-and-video safari in the restricted area. She subsequently created drawings of the animals that didn’t wander into the photo-and-video traps she had installed there. A few of the drawings allude to rumors about deformed “radioactive” creatures. A mixture of fantasy and reality, Chernobyl Safari shows a paradise for animals in a habitat that has been abandoned by humans—a paradise that was destroyed by the Russian invasion in February 2022 and left mined by the Russian military after it withdrew. The restricted zone thus became a war zone. Jermolaewa recently succeeded in recovering some of the imagery that was recorded by the wildlife cameras in February and March 2022. These current recordings will be on view in Bregenz for the first time.

The subject of war bookends the works that Jermolaewa will be showing in Bregenz. Her 2017 installation piece Dining Room makes it clear how people deal with war and its vestiges: from 1964 to 1973 the United States dropped over two million tons of bombs over Laos. Many of the bombs still lie buried as unexploded ordnance in the country’s soil. In a village outside of Phonsavan in Laos, residents have begun to produce and sell cutlery created from defused bombs. Dining Room is a dining room installation with cutlery made from these American duds. This work has never been shown in Austria before.