Anna C.E.E.H. is a Soviet Union–born, Vienna-based visual artist and independent curator. Her practice spans performance, post-feminist body politics, experimental printmaking, video, music, and subversive interventions in public space. Rooted in the legacy of both Eastern European resistance culture and Viennese Actionism, her work challenges dominant aesthetics, hierarchies, and systems of representation.
BIOGRAPHY
Anna C.E.E.H. is the daughter of Yury Mikhailov, a renowned post-expressionist and anti-Soviet painter from Leningrad. As teenager she emigrated as a Jewish refugee to Germany, just days after her father’s tragic suicide – a final refusal of adapting to the free market’s impact on Soviet art.
Ten years later, she re-entered the art world through conscious detours – settling in Vienna, where she studied under Franz Graf at the Academy of Fine Arts. Supported by her then-husband, nephew of Wolfgang Hollegha and Otto Zitko, she found a new artistic home. Early highlights include group shows in The Living Art Museum Reykjavik, Istanbul, and 10 Viennese libraries (2002), where she installed 50 provocative A0-size prints.
Since 2007, she is represented by Galerie Charim.
ARTISTIC PRACTICE
Anna C.E.E.H.’s work engages deeply with themes of ritual, rebellion, embodiment, and media deconstruction. Her practice combines performance, photography, sound, and print – often using her own body as a biopolitical and symbolic terrain.
Since 2003, she has developed a long-running series of self-portraits as a tool of ontological inquiry. These began with analog photographs – self-shot and hand-developed in the darkroom – often based on private performances (“à huis clos”). The body here is not objectified but becomes a space of transformation and resistance. Her performative gestures oscillate between voyeuristic seduction and estrangement, confronting normative gazes.
In her print work, C.E.E.H. employs DIY and glitch aesthetics: many images are produced on broken printers, which create distorted color schemes and visual errors. This method reflects both aesthetic and political strategies of refusal and breakdown. One key series (TODIE, 2008) was produced in the context of the Russo-Georgian war, while revisiting a landscape her late father once loved. The accidental “blood-smearing” of the prints became a haunting visual metaphor.
Her posters and slogans in public space („SQUIRTING HOLY MILK“, „DIE HEILIGE MILCH ABSPRITZEND“) often appear without imagery, sprayed with glowing pigments. These works explore language as resistance and poetic activism – a feminist, de-sacralized response to systems of control. As Brigitte Huck writes, her works embrace “a syncretist corporeality” and merge pop, cult, protest, and performance into a singular visual rhetoric.
One of her most impactful installations, the “Melktribüne / Himmelsstiege“ (ANNA CEEH/ Salvi 2010-2012), is a 6.5-ton, 18-meter-long phallic sound-tunnel facing the baroque Melk Abbey. Entered only by one person at a time, it references both a birth canal and a silent act of resistance. It reclaims space from religious and patriarchal authority through sonic and architectural subversion.
Similarly, her performance “MEN’S POWER“ (2018), held on Russia’s “Defender of the Fatherland Day” in Moscow, confronts toxic masculinity: men in standard white underwear perform exhausting push-ups on stone floors for 20 minutes. The audience’s polarized reactions – from nationalistic admiration to disgust – reveal deep cultural fissures.
In her most recent work, she creates iPhone-based digital overpaintings, drawing aesthetic reference from Arnulf Rainer. These works use found photographic material from Instagram, merging analog art historical gestures with contemporary digital platforms.
COLLABORATIONS & PROJECTS
- Franz Pomassl (since 2003): artistic partnership exploring sound, barriers of perception, and electronic landscapes (events, festivals, workshops, live- and DJ sets at Secession, CAT / MAK, Asia, Morocco, Lofoten, Mexico).
- Iv Toshain: Co-initiator of FXXXi̶s̶m̶ Toshain/Ceeh, a curatorial platform.
- Elena Tikhonova (since 2019): screenwriting and cinematic narrative experimentation.
- Marina Abramović, VALIE EXPORT, Carolee Schneemann: responded to Ceeh & Toshain’s manifestos with exclusive textual contributions, produced specifically for their feminist exhibition projects. These conceptual reactions underline the transgenerational dialogue and the political urgency of their shared concerns.collaborative intersections and shared exhibitions.
INFLUENCES & REFERENCES
Her visual language is informed by:
- Robert Rauschenberg and Andy Warhol (DYI prints, cultural narrative and mass media)
- Sergei Eisenstein, Dziga Vertov (video & montage)
- Hieronymus Bosch (allegorical complexity)
- Petrov-Vodkin (color symbolism and iconic structure)
- Arnulf Rainer (iPhone digital overpaintings)
- Viennese Actionism (corporeal radicality & resistance)
Anna C.E.E.H.’s artistic practice enters into a conscious dialogue with the feminist media and performance art of the 1970s—particularly with the radical visual language of VALIE EXPORT, with whom she shares not only representation at Galerie Charim but also a kindred political stance.
Both artists use their own bodies as projection surfaces and instruments of resistance: EXPORT’s “Tapp- und Tastkino” and “Aktionshose: Genitalpanik” once revolutionized the relationship between the body, public space, and systems of control. C.E.E.H. extends this legacy through a post-feminist lens, staging self-representation, voyeurism, and intimacy as ambivalent structures of power. Her corporeal gestures often evoke discomfort, even iconoclasm. While EXPORT reclaimed the female body from male systems of representation, C.E.E.H. works through overwriting, estrangement, and aesthetic distortion: motherhood is not idealized but demystified; sexuality is not offered as object of desire but treated as a symbolic field of subversion.
MAIN FOCUS
Language & the Body: Performance as embodied writing
Taboo & Subversion: Disrupting the gaze through erotic ambiguity
Institutional Critique: From religious architecture (Melktribüne) to national myths (Men’s Power)
Solo exhibitions: Charim Gallery (Vienna/ AT), Gallery HIT (Bratislava/ SK), Kunstbunker, Forum for contemporary art (Nurnberg/ DE), NCCA (Moscow/RU). Group exhibitions, projects (selection): MAM (Vienna/ AT), 5 th Marrakech Biennale (MA, 2014), MAMassachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art (USA), Russian Museum (St. Petersburg/ RU), Lentos Museum (Linz/ AT), Kunsthalle Krems (AT), CAT MAK (Vienna), Kunsthalle Exnergasse (Vienna), ART FORUM BERLIN (DE), Transit (Bratislava/SK), Barents Triennale (Kirkenes/NO, Murmansk/RU), Galerist Gallery (Istanbul/TK), ARCO (Madrid/ES), Shinjyuku Ganka Gallery (Tokio/JP), 21er Haus/ Belvedere and Augarten Contemporary (Vienna/AT), The Living Art Museum (Reykjavik/ISL), Volkspalast (Berlin/DE).
In this limited edition series, Anna C.E.E.H. merges digital glitch aesthetics with post-feminist body politics. Each motif is part of a wider inquiry into visibility, sacredness, and subversion – exploring how printed matter can carry both intimate and confrontational codes. The use of fragmented slogans, iconic poses, and distorted bodies reflects her ongoing interest in media deconstruction and ritualized language.
Technically rooted in her DIY printmaking methods, these works also echo the spirit of Viennese Actionism, reimagined through the lens of contemporary feminism. Each piece operates as both visual provocation and poetic fragment, drawing the viewer into a tension between beauty, resistance, and embodied critique.
ANNA C.E.E.H. is co-founder (with Franz Pomassl) of the sonic research project ⁄S⁄O⁄N⁄I⁄C⁄ ⁄Z⁄O⁄N⁄E⁄S⁄ incl. ZONE Club (former RUS KLUB) series at Vienna Secession (2003-2012) and RADIUS Festival for advanced electronic music and related visual art from Post Soviet Countries at CAT MAK, Vienna. ⁄S⁄O⁄N⁄I⁄C⁄ ⁄Z⁄O⁄N⁄E⁄S⁄ Festivals and Events in Azerbaijan, Belarus, Ukraine, Kazakhstan, Lithuania, Estonia, Russia (incl. Arctic, Siberia, Far East). (Honorary Mention Digital Musics & Sound Art, Ars Electronica 2011)
Since 2012 she has been the co/founder of the Art-Label FXXXis̶ ̶m̶ Toshain / C.E.E.H. (Vienna – Sofia – St.Petersburg). The collective operates under multiple brand names that change continually according to the concepts and issues they focus on (including, among others, FUCKi̶s̶m̶TC, FEMINi̶s̶m̶TC, FXXXi̶s̶m̶TC, XXXXi̶s̶m̶TC, SUCKi̶s̶m̶TC). It takes a critical stance toward ideologies and is a base for transpolitical art activities. It defines itself as a post-socialist post activist modular perpetual motion machine, which operates both on the level of discourse and performance. At the intersection of pop-cultural semantics, art theory, activism, and contemporary art, it serves as a platform for well-planned public operations/ interventions in the form of solo actions or cooperations with international artists.
Artist in Residencies:
2018 – BKA, Fabrica, Moskau (curated by Susanne Neuburger (MUMOK).
2016- TNW, Philippines (curated by Ursula Maria Probst, Melissa Lumbroso, Stephanie Misa, 2004 -OCA/ Norway (curated by Ute Meta Bauer)
Awards and prizes: Ars Electronica Nomination (2011 and 2008), Sophie Sussman Prize (2017), Innovation, Prize of the City of Vienna (2004)
Institutional collections where my work is represented:
Russian Museum (RU), Ostbottnian Museum (FI), Cultural Ministry of Austria, City of Vienna, SONS Museum (BE), MAMassachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art (US)
ANNA C.E.E.H. SIARGAO TRIBUNE- THE CLOUD IRON, ENVIROMENTAL ART TRANSMITTING STATION, Siargao Island, Philippines 2018 permanent
“Melktribüne / Himmelsstiege“ (2010-2012) – “A 6.5-ton steel phallus. Entry is allowed to one person only – into an experience of silence and resistance. “Melk” – both place and act: to milk, to strip of sanctity.”
Her work was International recepted by:
artStars* by Nadja Sayej (Canada, Berlin, New York), Artmagazine (AT), Parnass (AT), Artslant (DE), whitehot magazine of contemp. art (US), Local Suicide (DE), BLOUIN ARTINFO (CANADA), Art Forum (DE), Artribune (IT), VICE Creators (U.S.) etc
Exhibitions (selection)
2021
Parallel Editions, Charim Galerie Booth, Semperdepot Vienna
“Aesthetics of Politic”, International Congress of Belarusian Studies (Kaunas, Lithuania)
FXXXi̶s̶m̶ TC: Manifesto Wall at SAW Sofia Art Week (Bulgaria)
FXXXi̶s̶m̶ TC: Manifesto Wall NULLITY IS THE ONLY REVOLT, curated by Stefan Stoyanov, MOMA – Museum of Modern Art (Tiflis, Georgia)
Future under Construction, curated by Marija Nujic and Ema Kaiser-Branstätter, Vienna
“Self – portrait”, curated by Shi Jingjing, Sichuan Academy of Fine Arts, Chongqing (CH)
2020
Pink Flamingos, (Lisboa, PT),
Parallel (Vienna, AT)
Maquina Del Tiempo, Museo de la Ciudad (Santiago de Queretaro, MX)
2019
MERDELAMERDLAMER curated by Kendell Geers, MAM Galerie (Vienna, AT) Collective practice and women artist, Collective practice and women (Vienna, AT) artist ́s complicity, das weisse haus, Guerrilla Footage, FLUCA (Plovdiv, BG),
2018
⁄S⁄O⁄N⁄I⁄C⁄ ⁄Z⁄O⁄N⁄E⁄S⁄— A Journey Into Sonic Cultures & Electronic Music In The Post- Soviet Domain (Lofoten Sound Art Symposium (Lofoten, NO)
FXXXi̶s̶m̶ TC: MMF Performance on the Red Square (Moscow, RU)
2017
FXXXi̶s̶m̶ TC: MMF Performance, 57th Biennale Di (Venice, IT) PROCESS TERMINUS, Art Encounters (Timisoara, RO)
2016
FXXXi̶s̶m̶ TC: The 6. MOSCOW BIENNALE,
Freq_Out 12 presented by Tonspur and TBA 2 (Vienna, AT)
2015
“EUREKA” – curated by Kendel Geers, Galerist Gallery (Istanbul, TK) “Sho es or not Shoes“, SONS Museum, BE, 5.Moscow Biennale
2014
5 Marrakech Biennale – Theatre Royal (Marrakech, MA)
freq_out 1.2 ∞ – scandion (Uppsala, SE)
DARK ECOLOGY JOURNEY: NORTH NORWAY & RUSSIA – Sonic Acts Festival (Kirkenes/ NO, Nikel (RU)
2013
FXXXi̶s̶m̶ TC: „БАЙХТЕ”, Charim Events (Vienna, AT)
„Winter, Go away“, Wiener Festwochen (Vienna, AT)
FXXXi̶s̶m̶ TC:“HOT ВИЗИБЛ” , Kunstraum Niederösterreich (Vienna, AT) VIENNAFAIR / Charim Galerie (Vienna, AT)
2012
Death Can Dance“ Town House (Zürich, CH)
ANNA C.E.E.H. – IV TOSHAIN“, Künstlerhauspassage (Vienna, AT) Sonic Zones, Secession (Vienna, AT)
7th Berlin Biennale for Contemporary Art (Berlin, DE)
2011
„An Exchange with Sol LeWit“ Cabinet (New York, US)
Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art (Massachusetts, US)
Disseminating Sound“ The Morning Line TBA-21 (Vienna, AT)
Summer in the City!“ Charim Galerie (Vienna, AT)
DREI EINZELLESEHE NNICHT ERREICHBAR ÜBER IMMERNOCH NICHT – Abbas /Ebensperger Project #3 – Kunstbuero– curated by Franz Graf, (Vienna, AT)
2010
„WIENER AKTIONISMUS UND AKTUELLE ÖSTERREICHISCHE FOTOGRAFIE“– Galerie Julius Hummel (Vienna, AT) „IMAGINARY ROOMS AND VIRTUAL TIME CAPSULES. 11 WEEKS OF TRANSMISSIONS“ – Galerie Charim (Vienna, AT) (solo) „Melktribune“ (Melk, AT)
„Sky in the art“ The Russian Museum (St. Petersburg, RU)
2009
„The Center of Attention. Kunst als Soziotopie“ Vienna Art Week (Vienna, AT)
„Trinity“ Sinjyuku ganka Garou Galerie (Tokyo, JP) „Photophobia 2“ NCCA (Kalinigrad, RU)
„KÜNSTLER ALS DJS“ Augarten Contemporary (Vienna, AT)
2008
Charim Galerie ART FORUM BERLIN (Berlin, DE)
„Man With A Movie Camera-global remake“ with Perry Bard – Sheffield Railroad Station (Sheffield, UK) Joyce Yahouda Gallery (Montreal, CA), ISEA (SG), (Beijing, CN)
„Hidden Curriculum“ – Kunstbunker – Forum for contemporary arts (Nurnberg, DE)
2006
“Urban” Music video Lentos Museum (Linz, AT)
Tónleikar+video, klinK og BanK/ 2005 & Converter Project, Living Art Museum (Reykjavik, IS)
