Text for the Anna Taganzeva’s exhibition at Vienna Collectors Club

Anna Taganzeva’s new series and the exhibition sensitive data address the specificity of our optics and the limits of consciousness under conditions of total datafication. At the centre is the impossibility of perceiving reality as static and whole: a continuous stream of images whose semantic foundations have eroded, their connections replaced by cuts and algorithmic coincidence. What remains are flashes of the screen horizon, seen through datafied vision. What kind of vision is this, and what do we actually see — these are the questions Anna poses in this project.

The exhibition unfolds in three parts. The first, the swan part, refers to a symbolic realm. An ideal, shimmering world, simultaneously inaccessible and omnipresent. The second, the photo part, consists of small canvases painted from photographs taken from Anna’s personal gallery: casual snapshots, selfies, artefacts, friends' works, city views, and reels footage. The structure of this visuality resembles the calculated randomness of algorithms: it pursues no narrative, but reflects a point of absence and desire transformed into visual data. Natural and symbolic images create a semantic bridge — masks of an illusory wholeness, echoing the swans. Like streams of images, the movement of the natural elements binds the series through an internal rhythm. The paintings feel as though passed through a melancholic filter: like a feed and its pictures, from which you are already tired. They place the viewer in the position of a detached yet continuously scrolling observer. The third relief part, reflects events that do not exist. Imprints and indentations function as traces of perception that has passed through algorithmic connections — as our absorption into a current whose boundaries and directions are unimaginable.

Contemporary art flees the present not by resisting the flow of time, but by collaborating with it, wrote Boris Groys. So too Anna in this project opens herself to her own vision of the moment, capturing what she and her devices see. In this sense the artist suspends the present stream, pulling figures and compositions from it and replaying them in the painterly medium, which demands greater attention and immersion. By underscoring the fleetingness of shifting frames, Anna opens for us a vision of the future — inseparable from nature, relief, and the flow of the feed.

Anna Taganzeva is a multidisciplinary artist working across painting and sculpture. Born in Saint Petersburg, she studied at the Institute of Contemporary Art Moscow (ICA, 2015–2018) and is currently completing her degree at the Academy of Fine Arts Vienna. She is a recipient of the Garage Digital grant (2021/2022) and the VAC grant (2023), and has undertaken residencies at the Vladimir Smirnov and Konstantin Sorokin Foundation, Garage Studio, and Smena (Kazan).Her work has been shown internationally in solo and group exhibitions at Garage Museum of Contemporary Art (Moscow), ART4 Museum (Moscow), Basel ArtCenter, Galerie Merman (Paris), and the Austrian Cultural Forum Moscow, among others. 

Arina Nekliudova is a Vienna-based curator, writer, and performer. She holds degrees in history and art history from Lomonosov Moscow State University and in art at the University of Applied Arts Vienna. Her practice bridges institutional and independent contexts, with a focus on Eastern European contemporary art, as well as digital cultures. She has curated exhibitions at MuseumsQuartier Wien, Otto Wagner Areal, brut Wien, Kunstverein Baden. Since 2021 she has worked as curator at blazar young art fair and since 2023 as curator at SAMPLE Gallery. 

Vienna Collectors Club is an art association with the aim of supporting and promoting emerging artists by building a platform for exchange and communication with a local network of collectors, founded by Anna Ignatovich in 2020. The Vienna Collectors Club Kulturverein realises exhibition projects in a room in the historic Hochhaus Herrengasse building that serve both to give young Viennese women artists a presence and to improve their relationship with Viennese collectors.