Berlinische Galerie

Anna Zett is an artist and writer. With a practice that is at once analytical and emotional she challenges dominant structures, creating space for open dialogue and personal experience. This has given rise to films, installations, radio plays, texts and live formats such as the recent collaborative research project “Postsocialist Group Improvisation”. Over the last few years, her work has revolved around East German perspectives on resistance.
The Berlinische Galerie is screening her latest video “Es gibt keine Angst” [Afraid Doesn’t Exist] (2023, 31 min.), set in a bygone police state. Zett calls it an “archive thriller”. Based on her own childhood experiences and several months spent working and researching at the Archiv der DDR-Opposition in Berlin, Zett has constructed a short thriller that is both gripping and poetic. It centres on the second occupation of the city’s Stasi headquarters in September 1990, accompanied by a hunger strike. Few are aware today of this act of political self-empowerment. Some footage was shot in the Umweltbibliothek, founded in 1986, an important hub in the network of the grassroots peace and environmental movement in East Berlin.
Anna Zett interweaves images from late GDR counterculture and television with a dense tissue of voices from a poetry cassette recorded in East Berlin in 1986. The associative narrative is embedded within a multi-track collage (composition: Matti Gajek) of improvised and underground music from the period.