ANNA CEEH: CONSTRUCTIVIST PSYCHEDELIA & POP INTERFERENCE
Anna Ceeh’s works operate at the fringes of what is typically called “art”: glitchy photocopies, damaged printer cartridges, broken image-sound loops, manipulated brightness and color—what she calls her subversive and anarchic element. Her works disturb aesthetic pleasure not for effect’s sake, but to open spaces of thinking, feeling, and unlearning.
Drawing from Soviet media legacies, Western pop tactics, and détourned news imagery, Ceeh creates audiovisual seductions that lure us in—only to undermine coherence, narrative, and control.
Her art resists the exoticization of the “Other,” questions clichés of dissent and revolution, and offers no answers—only perceptual traps, shimmering surfaces, and the quiet refusal to resolve.
What remains is a cracked image-regime that neither desires authority nor utopia—but asks where either might still live.
…
“DIGITAL BLOOM“, 2025
“DIGITAL BLOOM“, 2025
A visual essay by Anna CEEH
In the series Digital Bloom, Anna CEEH reworks her earlier visual explorations (Flowers of Evil) into a striking digital transformation. Layers of found footage, overpainted with electric color, noise, and expressive glitch aesthetics, evoke a field of visual tension—between softness and rupture, beauty and defiance.
Rather than posing opposition, the series insists on a holistic gaze. It embraces dualities without collapsing them: organic and digital, personal and political, ornamental and urgent.
Anna CEEH’s practice combines visual precision with conceptual rupture. Across photography, sound, and performance, her work resonates with mythological undercurrents while engaging in thoroughly contemporary discourses around identity, agency, and cultural memory.
Rooted in the post-Soviet experience and subtly informed by Finno-Ugric heritage, her pieces reflect a layered understanding of belonging, dislocation, and transformation. The figure of Freyja—the Norse goddess of love and war—hovers in the background: not as contradiction, but as archetype of productive duality. Tenderness and resistance, intimacy and autonomy unfold side by side in these blooming disruptions.
Digital Bloom becomes not a protest, but a proposal: to see the world as a constellation of tensions held in poetic equilibrium.
-> Selected works from this series are available as limited edition fine art prints.
ANNA CEEH: Reframed Realities / Surface Revisions, 2024-25
Old masters – Botticelli, Schiele, perhaps Rainer.
Images we believe we already know reappear – now glowing on digital screens, distant yet omnipresent.
I do not reach for the original, but for its digital shadow – for what remains when the masterpiece becomes a file.
As Arnulf Rainer once approached his overpaintings – not as destruction but as a continuation of breath – I, too, search within digital repetition for a new origin: a moment when the gesture once again touches the copied image.
From multiplication emerges the singular; from distance, a quiet dialogue.
Between the masterpiece and its digital afterlife, Reframed Realities explores the shifting aura of the image in the age of endless reproduction.
Echoing Walter Benjamin’s reflections on the loss of aura in mechanical reproduction, the series traces a reverse movement – from the multiplied to the singular, from data to gesture. Each overpainted screenshot becomes a surface of resistance, where touch, error, and material presence re-enter the digital image.
In dialogue with Vilém Flusser’s vision of the image as code and Friedrich Kittler’s discourse on media materiality, the work questions what remains of “originality” when technology becomes both tool and canvas.
At the same time, it recalls Gilles Deleuze’s notion of the surface as the site of sense – a fragile zone between depth and appearance, where meaning does not reside but happens.
Reframed Realities is not a return to authenticity, but an act of revision – a fragile, hybrid surface where past and pixel, reproduction and presence briefly coincide.
ANNA CEEH: „ELL PROUN ONE“, Lightboxes 70x100cm for BREITWIESER Natural Stones, 2022
ANNA CEEH: „ELL PROUN ONE“, Lightboxes 70x100cm for BREITWIESER Natural Stones, 2022
With ELL PROUN ONE, Anna C.E.E.H. reactivates the experimental vision of El Lissitzky’s PROUN series (“Project for the Affirmation of the New”)—a radical attempt, made over a century ago, to fuse painting and architecture into a new visual language of space and form.
In this contemporary homage, C.E.E.H. constructs seven lightbox modules that function as hybrid objects: part sculpture, part screen, part spatial intervention. Over her own photographs, DIY prints, and digital found footage, she applies layers of overpainting and distortion, creating luminous panels that glow with constructed memory and mediated materiality.
Originally conceived for the ICONIC OBJECTS ARTBAR, this project bridges modernist utopias with present-day aesthetics, suggesting a kind of meta-modernism—where historical avant-garde ideals are refracted through today’s media languages and personal mythologies.
ANNA CEEH “O.R. 21” Digital Paintings, 2021
In the series Anna C.E.E.H. moves beyond DIY printing into the realm of digital painting, transforming both found imagery and documentation of her own performances. The body, once central and confronting, begins to dissolve, blur, or vanish entirely—overpainted with abstract gestures, chromatic layers, or digital erasure.
These works mark a shift in her practice: from physical presence to ephemeral absence, from biopolitical confrontation to spectral trace. The performative body no longer demands attention but instead melts into color, glitch, and silence.
The series reflects on visibility and disappearance, trauma and memory—where self-representation becomes a field of intuitive distortion, echoing the digital condition of fragmentation and transformation.
ANNA CEEH x ELL BORGIAS, collaborative objects
ANNA C.E.E.H.: “O.R.* Mexican Light” DIY prints in matt photo paper, 2020
is a lyrical visual diary created during a transitional moment: while Europe was still under the shadow of COVID-19, Mexico remained open, vibrant, and luminous. In this series, Anna C.E.E.H. captures the emotional contrast between isolation and abundance, fear and sensorial immersion.
The works were photographed during her journey through indigenous and syncretic cultural landscapes—from the mystical P’urhépecha regions to the vibrant streets of Querétaro. They are then reworked through her distinct DIY print method: layered, distorted, and infused with glitch aesthetics, turning moments of everyday beauty into fragile, dreamlike traces.
O.R. is an homage to Mexican light, ritual, and multiplicity—a poetic reimagining of space where the visual residue of a journey becomes a quiet act of reverence. The series resists exoticization, instead offering a personal, tactile reflection shaped by intimacy, dislocation, and wonder.
ANNA CEEH: ROSSO (after Dario Argento), DIY prints in matt photo paper, 2020
Created during the first wave of the COVID-19 lockdown in Florence, ROSSO draws from the haunting cinematic universe of Dario Argento, the Italian master of psychological horror. Using film stills—particularly from his cult classic Profondo Rosso—Anna C.E.E.H. reprocesses the saturated aesthetics and visual codes of 1970s horror cinema through her signature DIY print techniques.
The images are manually overprinted in multiple layers, intentionally using faulty printers that introduce color shifts, misalignments, and glitch-like errors. These interventions fracture the glossy illusion of film and instead create textured, corporeal surfaces—echoing the body’s vulnerability and the psychological fragmentation of isolation.
In ROSSO, red becomes not just a color but a symbol of threat, intimacy, and beauty. By translating Argento’s cinematic language into print, C.E.E.H. opens a dialogue between high-stylized horror and contemporary anxiety, turning pop-cultural memory into a space of poetic resistance.
ANNA CEEH: AustrianAutumn 21120, 2020-2021
Triptychs, DIY overprinted press images and personal photography, 2020–2021
This powerful series was created in response to the Vienna terror attack of November 2, 2020. As both a resident of Vienna and a Jewish artist, Anna C.E.E.H. experienced the event not only as a citizen, but as a deeply personal rupture. The triptychs juxtapose shocking press images of the attack with her own photographs taken the same day in the calm, indifferent stillness of the Wienerwald.
Using her signature DIY print method – including overprinting with faulty machines and layering visual noise – the works become memorials of dissonance. Beauty and horror collide. Nature continues quietly while the city bleeds.
The title plays with distortion (“21120”) to mark a moment of fracture in Austrian memory, refracted through the lens of a body already shaped by exile and inherited trauma. In each triptych, time, perception, and pain are compressed into visual tension – resisting resolution, demanding remembrance.
ANNA CEEH: Les Fleures du Mal. Italian Light, 2020
Created during the first wave of COVID-19, this series captures the haunting stillness of a deserted Italian city Firenze. Anna C.E.E.H., stranded in lockdown, wandered through silent streets, photographing fragments of urban emptiness, stray shadows, and decaying floral motifs — visual remnants of paused life.
The title evokes Baudelaire’s ambivalent beauty and reflects the emotional tension of the moment: isolation, fear, and unexpected serenity. These photographs were later processed through C.E.E.H.’s typical DIY glitch technique — repeatedly overprinted using a defective printer. Each layer of ink and error disrupts the clean image, embedding personal and collective trauma into the surface.
The results are fragile and spectral, like faded memory imprints or visual prayers. Through this process, C.E.E.H. transforms documentary into emotional topography, where pandemic reality meets poetic distortion.
ANNA CEEH: Lebanese Summer 2020, DIY prints on matt paper, 2020
In this series, Anna C.E.E.H. uses press photography as raw material, confronting the media’s role in shaping collective trauma. Working with found images from the Beirut port explosion of August 2020, she applies her signature DIY printmaking process: the photographs are reprinted on basic matte paper using a malfunctioning printer, creating glitches, smudges, and distortions that act as both aesthetic and political gestures.
The resulting images carry traces of malfunction and mourning — explosions that blur into flesh tones, concrete dust merging with skin. The overprintings become metaphors for how violence is consumed, aestheticized, or erased.
By reprocessing these images, C.E.E.H. questions the visual language of catastrophe, reclaiming it through material vulnerability and poetic distortion. The series is an act of quiet resistance, challenging the normalization of mediated suffering and offering a counter-image shaped by bodily affect and post-digital imperfection.
ANNA CEEH: FEAST OF FEASTS, CELEBRATION OF CELEBRATIONS. THE COLOR OF BLOOD
Performance, AIR Studio Moscow, Russian Easter 2018
Realized during the Artist-in-Residence grant by the Austrian Federal Ministry (BKA)
This site-specific performance took place during Russian Easter in a stark white space in Moscow. Referencing both Hermann Nitsch’s Pentecost actions and Sergei Parajanov’s film The Color of Pomegranates, it strikes its own tone – ritualistic, restrained, physical.
A young, naked man stood silently in the room. One by one, he poured six bottles of consecrated church wine over his head. The red liquid soaked the white bed sheet he wore like a garment – heavy, saturated, permeating. Beneath him, a dark red pool began to spread: a haunting image of surrender, shame, ecstasy, and dissolution.
The action poetically yet confrontationally addressed themes of spiritual elevation, religious ritual, and collective body imagery. With each drop, the moment intensified – not loud, but disturbingly immersive. A shiver ran through the performer’s body – and through the audience.
This censored video work, part of Anna C.E.E.H.’s Mother_Phrenia series, stages the artist’s own body as a gendered, political organism in defiance of societal norms and symbolic regimes.
Referencing the medieval motif of the “Lactation of Saint Bernard”, where the Virgin sprays milk into a male saint’s mouth, C.E.E.H. reclaims this imagery through a contemporary, feminist lens. Her act of squirting breast milk becomes both a ritual and rebellion—a subversive gesture that confronts the historical exploitation of the female body by religion, patriarchy, and culture.
The body in Mother_Phrenia is not maternalized or eroticized—it leaks, resists, erupts. Milk becomes a weapon, intimacy turns into confrontation, and traditional gender binaries are destabilized through the language of performance and fluidity.
ANNA CEEH: MOTHER_PHRENIA.AnTENATAL_3, 2011
This monochrome work belongs to a key cycle in Anna C.E.E.H.’s ongoing investigation of motherhood, psychopolitics, and the female body. Created during her “antenatal” period, the series confronts the idealization of maternity and destabilizes symbolic representations of the “sacred mother.”
The fragmented pose, stark lighting, and almost clinical black-and-white tonality suggest a psychic split between societal expectation and bodily reality. Referencing both medical photography and performance documentation, the image resists romanticized notions of care and origin. The title – a hybrid of mother, schizophrenia, and antenatal – hints at the inner conflicts and cultural scripts that structure female identity.
As with much of C.E.E.H.’s work, the body here is not an object of glorification, but a site of rupture, ritual, and coded rebellion.
SUBVERSIVE PRINTS – ERROR AS TRUTH – “TODIE“
Since the early 2000s, Anna Ceeh has been experimenting with deliberately dysfunctional reproduction techniques. Her photographs are not produced in flawless high gloss, but through broken printers, depleted ink cartridges, and mechanical glitches. The errors are not corrected – they are the concept. This intentional sabotage of technology becomes a form of visual truth: what emerges from the machine bears traces of resistance, unrest, and loss of control.
This approach is particularly striking in a 2008 series TODIE created during the military conflict between Russia and Georgia. At that time, Ceeh visited a place deeply cherished by her father – a post-expressionist, anti-Soviet painter – shortly before his death. The quiet, ritualistic performance she enacted there was later printed using a malfunctioning printer. The resulting traces resemble streaks of blood; the color smears evoke open wounds. The aesthetic is raw, fragmented, almost brutal.
These corrupted printing techniques reflect not only the rupture of war, but also the fracture between personal mourning, political reality, and artistic expression. The body – often merely suggested in these works – merges with the flawed surface. The technology “bleeds,” the printer “fails,” and from this failure emerges an image of resistance: one that opposes both the polished aesthetics of the art market and the smooth surfaces of political propaganda.
Ceeh’s prints are not reproductions – they are autonomous acts. Each print is a performative imprint of a broken system – poetic, political, and deeply personal.
ANNA CEEH – VERBAL1, Mimaki Print on Makrolon
This work by Anna C.E.E.H. explores the layered tensions and poetics of language, script, and cultural memory. It merges Cyrillic and Latin alphabets into a hybrid visual-textual body—where meaning is not only carried by the words, but by their visual encoding.
The related audio-visual work “VERBAL” is a part of MAMassachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art (US) art collection.
ANNA CEEH: “Ontological Realities” 2004-2006
In this limited edition series, Anna C.E.E.H. merges digital glitch aesthetics with post-feminist body politics. Each motif forms part of a broader 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.
Visually, the series flirts with erotic Pop iconography while referencing the faded glory and absurdity of Soviet visual culture. Red stars, military caps, and pseudo-heroic stances are stripped of their ideological weight and recharged as playful yet subversive codes. C.E.E.H.’s bodies are neither passive nor objectified – they demand attention, oscillating between seduction and confrontation. The result is a visual language that feels at once retro and radical, ironic and sincere – a hybrid of glamour, protest, and personal mythology.
ANNA CEEH by Didi Neidhart*, 2015
“Filming television images is among the oldest practices for pulling the ground out from under the feet of reality—both the reality of media and that of the so-called “real” world.
It is a magical gaze through the camera lens, one that produces flicker, alters colors, and has the power to transform perception in lasting ways.
Above all, it is an artistic practice—one fundamentally accessible to everyone.
Nothing even needs to be filmed. It’s enough to shift one’s gaze through a lens (or a tinted pair of glasses), and reality begins to dissolve.
The camera, both as eye and as active agent, scans a world already scanned before—and in doing so, it reveals that world as a construction.
Every cut is an incision into space and time.
Every invisible cut manipulates the eye, deceives it.
Not only cinema, but television too, is a theater of illusions.
A magic box of optical sleight-of-hand.
The paradox of filmed television images:
Far from confronting the images with their constructedness—far from stripping them of their “soul” or holding up a mirror to their artifice—
the act of re-filming transforms these images into phantoms of themselves.
The magical eye of the camera renders them magical objects in turn:
it estranges them, derealizes them, finds no ominous core—only more and more mystery.
It probes, it laps at their surfaces, until abstraction takes over:
until all that remains is flicker, noise, tearing motion—
a relentless fluttering back and forth.
But this smearing and obscuring does not stand in opposition to clarity.
It sharpens seeing, and thinking, and attention.
Only the blurred allows another kind of focus to emerge.
Only the sharp lets the blurred escape the self-flattening chaos of image regimes
that cancel themselves out in endless noise.
Flipping through TV channels is one thing.
But filming this zapping turns it into a kind of cut-up:
illusions and collapses of realities become the very preconditions for questioning them.
“Once, just for fun, I filmed a news broadcast in St. Petersburg. Through the lens, I saw the first images of the school hostage crisis in Beslan.
It was a strange experience—because while the images felt deeply alienated, they also became strangely intimate.
The events were right there, close. And yet I perceived them as a kind of construction.”
— Anna Ceeh
So the question becomes:
What kind of resistance can be offered to a medium like television—or to ‘reality’ itself?
And conversely:
What resistance does the medium—or ‘reality’—offer back to us?
Where can we find other images, other ways of seeing, other image-experiences
beyond the endless multiplicity of visual regimes that parade as unconventional—
yet conform to the paradigm of forced nonconformity as supposed self-expression?
Tactics and techniques of derealization and unreality—especially in time-based art forms like film, video, or music—
carry with them at least two major pitfalls:
Exoticism: the seemingly funny, strange, scandalous, or “other” from both foreign and familiar cultures,
and
Escapism: a purely affective plunge into amusing, bizarre, scandalous image-worlds—psychedelic spectacles consumed as obscure visual pleasures.
So:
How to resist the lure of voyeuristic psychedelic experience?
First and foremost, it’s not about disposing of the psychedelic altogether—
such repression would only cause it to resurface elsewhere in the image.
Anna Ceeh herself refers to the colors she uses to tint her images as “the subversive and anarchic element”—
because in the act of “coloring the world,” what is really being altered is the perception of reality itself.
We become, in a sense, eyewitnesses to alternative constructions of reality.
A similar method characterizes her visual practice, much of which is composed of color photocopies—
manipulated via damaged, half-empty, or switched-out printer cartridges,
so that previously captured realities are filtered through something akin to visual effect pedals.
Let’s call it, unapologetically: constructivist psychedelia.
This work with effects, with surfaces, is what Anna Ceeh herself describes as her “pop element.”
The artificial, the constructed, the made—combined with brightness, exuberance, ecstasy, extravagance.
In short:
Anna Ceeh’s art operates at the fringes of what is commonly accepted as “art.”
Her “pop elements” do not shy away from pure effect, from alleged spectacle, glamour, or trash.
But neither are they an end in themselves.
Rather, they open direct access to her work.
In the spirit of the old Soft Cell motto—“Luring Disco Dollies to a Life of Vice” (from Sex Dwarf, 1981)—
these images, and especially the music used alongside them, function as audiovisual seductions.
They pull us into a cosmos of sound and vision.
Loud music and colorful images become artworks that want to connect with us.
We may reject them—but we cannot ignore them.
The same applies to exoticism and escapism.
Or, put differently:
Anna Ceeh’s work does not deny these forces.
“The fact that many things I filmed in countries of the former USSR are perceived as exotic in the West was never the goal,” she says.
“That’s why I also filmed a lot here, in places like Austria—for the very purpose of dissolving those contradictions.”
We also know this by now:
Few phantasms are more persistent than those projected onto the supposed “Other.”
The West as a phantom of the East, the East as a phantom of the West—
both belong to their respective discourses of domination.
When one of these phantoms collapses, it often takes our own sense of identity with it.
Art, in this context, can at best function as a benevolent corrective—
or as interruption, as irritation, offering alternative images and sounds.
But even alternative images and sounds often only serve as comfortable reassurance—
confirming that we are, somehow, still on “the right side.”
And that’s usually where it ends.
Anna Ceeh’s work stands in direct opposition to these convenient, banal forms of dissent.
Here, the goal is not to “understand” anything at all—
and her pop tactics can just as well be read as invitations to follow completely false trails.
Instead, her work continuously disrupts associative chains,
loops are broken, music cuts off abruptly, resumes with an entirely different track—
or simply stops, while the video keeps running in silence
(sometimes far more haunting than with sound).
Monochrome fields suddenly overlay the entire image.
Brightness levels are manipulated mid-sequence.
Found footage becomes a split screen of a splintered reality—
over which no one (least of all the artist) would dare claim control or impose a masterplan.
Still, the montages, the image/sound disjunctions, the interruptions in communication, the gaps, voids, and black holes—
these are not random arrangements.
They do more than simply disturb aesthetic pleasure:
they act as invitations—into zones of incomprehensibility, darkness, and mystery—
zones where a new kind of thinking might emerge:
about reality, regimes of images, exoticisms, escapisms, and beyond.
Disruption and unintelligibility become preconditions for something different—
something that neither seeks to dominate nor to be dominated.
Anna Ceeh’s video works also respond to the dulling of traditional protest forms within the context of art—
and to a kind of revolutionary pathos that, while hollowed out, remains fashionable in many parts of the West.
Her works, with all their sharpness and fragmentation,
lack any trace of revolutionary romanticism.
And yet, they do not throw out the revolutionary or utopian altogether.
Instead, they ask:
Where, today, might the real substance of these ideas still be found?
They open up spaces—of thought, of relation, of fracture and niche—
outside systems of control and domination,
without ever pretending that such spaces are truly free from power.”
Didi Neidhart (b. 1963 in Salzburg) is a musician, DJ, author, lecturer and former editor‑in‑chief of skug – Journal für Musik, known for cultural criticism, pop‑history writing, radio work and media‑arts collaborations in Austria and Germany.