Ann Messner

Description

Ann Messner is a pioneer – as significant as she is largely overlooked – of a more hidden tradition of unauthorised public art. In doing so, she creates utopian, temporary and, above all, experimental zones that transcend all conventions. The spatial and functional dimensions of the city provide the resonant space for Messner’s interventions – self-empowered and autonomous. The New York-based artist pays no heed to permits when she feeds her alienating illuminations into the all-too-familiar non-places of the urban infrastructure machinery. Almost everything that is celebrated today as ‘street art’ had already been explored by Ann Messner before the dawn of the 1980s. Dives into the underground, life-threatening interventions in road traffic, love stories, Petites Résistances. And where, in fact, are the items of clothing she stole from a C&A department store in Cologne in 1978? Only the camera, which the artist never concealed, may have given passers-by the idea that this could be an art action. Messner creates video works or documentary artefacts that depict ‘non-sites’. At the Urban Art Biennale 2026, she is presenting, for the very first time, a mini-retrospective of her film works, ranging from Stealing and Subway Stories from 1978 to Blind me! LIGHT with Katharina Gruzei from 2023.

traffic 1978 / edited 2024
S8mm digital transfer
7:17 mins
Low-resolution copy
Dual-camera shot 2024

subway stories and other shorts 1978–79
Super 8 digital transfer
13:33 mins
Full version, digitised in 1998

slalom 1978 / edited 2023–24
S8mm digital transfer
10:00 mins

stealing 1978
Super 8 digital transfer
C&A summer sale, Cologne, Germany
7:23 mins

subway story ad dis-placement 1978–79 / edited 2024
Digital transfer from 35mm black-and-white footage to digital film
4:11 mins

blind me! LIGHT
in collaboration with Katharina Gruzei
Online footage from live traffic cameras, New York and Vienna
2023