Artist Talk with Anna Ehrenstein and Ariana Dongus

Overview

How much human labor goes into “artificial” intelligence? Artist Anna Ehrenstein and AI researcher Ariana Dongus engage this question in conversation.

The discussion builds on Ehrenstein’s exhibition The Language of the Soil, which interrogates AI’s infrastructures and the labor conditions they rely on. The project is grounded in ongoing research and collaborations with digital workers and practitioners, including Richard Mathenge, Mophat Okinyi, and Fasica Berhane, among others, in Nairobi and Cairo.

Rather than framing AI as autonomous or immaterial, the conversation places AI systems within existing labor networks, colonial histories, extractive processes, and the global platform economy. Ehrenstein and Dongus also reflect on questions of authorship, the political dimensions of AI, and how artistic practice can engage and challenge these structures.

Author and researcher Yaniya Lee moderates the discussion.
 

Image credit: Anna Ehrenstein  © Fotografiska Berlin / Ariana Dongus © Bahar Kaygusuz

About the Moderator

Yaniya Lee is a writer, researcher, and teacher whose work draws on narratives of liberation to develop new methodologies for art history, criticism, and archival practice. Recent projects include the publications Buseje Bailey: Reasons Why We Have to Disappear Every Once in a While, A Black Art History Project (Artexte, 2024) and Selected Writing on Black Canadian Art (figure ground/Art Metropole, 2024), a collection of her writing; Image War on Reality,  a curated program of short videos for MOMENTA Biennale; and the Black Canadian Art History Scholarship Database (blackartstudy.ca), a searchable catalogue of theses and dissertations on Black art in Canada. 

About the Speakers

Anna Ehrenstein

Anna Ehrenstein (b. 1993, Germany/Albania) works in transdisciplinary artistic practice with an emphasize on research, pedagogy and collaboration. Her practice encompasses lens-based media, installation, social moments, and writing. She studied media art, photography and curation and has been teaching at various prestigious academies and institutions, amongst others Bard College, Technical University and UDK Berlin, Germany, Stellenbosch Academy South Africa or Photopia Cairo, Egypt. Born in Germany to Albanian parents with transottoman ancestry: Albanian, Turkish, Kosovar & Egyptian; she is interested in concepts of plasticity, creolisation, myths, islamic & proto-science fiction and popular culture. Her works circulate around the material culture of the periphery, networked images and ecologies in our interconnected state of prosumption. The materialization of intangible data is as much part of her installation process as community and collectivity.  

Ehrenstein exhibited internationally and her work is found in public and private collections; amongst others the Museum of Modern Art Warszawa, the collection of the German State or the Fotomuseum Winterthur. She was awarded with the C/O Berlin Talent Award (2020) and was amongst others nominated for the Prix Pictet.

Ariana Dongus

Ariana Dongus is a critical media scholar, teacher, and researcher based in Berlin.Her research has led her to Istanbul, Diyarbekir in Southeastern Turkey, and Northern Iraq, focusing on refugees, migration, and technology. From 2018 to 2022, she was a research associate at the University of Arts and Design in Karlsruhe (HfG), where she taught media theory and coordinated KIM, a research group on critical studies of artificial intelligence. In 2021, she received the AI Newcomer Award, awarded by the German Society for Informatics and the Federal Ministry of Education and Research

Schedule

• 13:30 Door open 
• 14:00 Artist Talk and Q&A 
• 15:00 Wrap up

Tickets

• Event: 0 € 
• Members: RSVP link in the Member Newsletter