New Artists to Watch: The Art of Anna Nezhnaya

 Berlin based artist Anna Nezhnaya, photo by Vladislav Sinchuk

By Habib William Kherbek December 28, 2024

The image worlds of Anna Nezhnaya are uneasy places. Nezhnaya’s works regularly combine mythological subjects with contemporary aesthetics and technologies. The results often speak of the uncomfortable relationship between the contemporary moment and anxieties and archetypes from the deep, murky recesses of the human mind. The digital  age, with its smooth lines and rounded edges, its apparent rationality and efficiency, is a  myth in its own right. Nezhnaya’s willingness to wade into these uncertain waters  bespeaks an awareness of the ways in which stories intertwine: we craft new fictions for  ourselves about who we are and what we believe in part to differentiate ourselves from the  stories that shaped those who came before us. We are smarter, more reasonable, less  given to biases, superstitions and other forms of social pathology than previous ages.  Right? Nezhnaya’s works suggest otherwise.  

First solo show DOWN THE RABBIT HOLE in FORA project space, Berlin, 2022
 

Mythologies fill in spaces of ignorance. When faced with the unknown, create a story to  bridge the gap in knowledge and hope that the story goes unquestioned. Into this dynamic are poured a thousand prejudices, biases, and outright forms of othering. The rise of  feminist critics and artists training their sights on faery tales and myth have located the  intrinsic instability and anxiety at the heart of many forms of myth and ‘cautionary tales’.  The project has its beginnings in the feminist uprisings of the last century, and carries  through into Nezhnaya’s works. Her paintings often feature totemic mythical crossroads of  fate and the feminine spirit. The use of modern materials, especially neon, lend a further  dimension of psychological depth. Neon is the illuminant of choice of the urban underbelly,  a by word for temptation; flicking on the switch of a neon light activates another switch in  the primal nexus of desire: the strange, otherworldly glow of neon illuminates aspects of  one’s own soul that are perhaps invisible even to oneself. Nezhnaya, much like the  serpent in the garden of Eden, depicted in as a weary but threatening network of colours in  Forbidden Fruit (2023), proceeds by posing questions. The serpent’s question to Eve in  the Book of Genesis in the face of the original forbidden fruit was simply the following  ‘Surely you will not die.’ Nezhnaya’s serpent seems less willing to offer assurances, the  tangle of fangs and light seems to say ‘you might die, but what else were you going to do?’  

ANNA NEZHNAYA, FREEDOM, 2022
 

Feminist readings of the temptation narrative from Genesis provide varied understandings  of putting the woman at the centre of the story of the ‘Fall of Man’, from the 1970s UK  feminist journal Spare Rib to more recent reinterpretations of the traditionally misogynist  reading of the story, the determination of male dominated power structures to see women  as ‘agents of chaos’ continues to the present. Where the boundaries of chaos and order lie  - and the value of each as a concept in its own right - however remains an open question.  

Nezhnaya’s work Gods and Monsters also visits the realms of mythology. In this and  related works the artist seeks to examine how women themselves become monsters in the  eyes of patriarchy. The spectre of the succubus, squatting on the chest of a sleeping  person, draining their life-force to demonic purposes appears in several of Nezhnaya’s  works. The image of the demon has been a popular subject in visual art, with iconic  representations by the Swiss painter Henry Fuseli’s gothic horror ‘The Nightmare’ (1781),  to more recent references to the image in promotional images for the rapper Doja Cat.  Though Fuseli saw the demon as truly otherworldly, historically succubi are typically coded  as female, and Nezhnaya’s oil on canvas work ‘Your Ex Girlfriend’ explicitly gestures to this  misogynistic association. Nezhnaya’s version of the succubus is appropriately spectral,  composed of a few brushstrokes that form a red outline of the creature. The greenish  yellow background bleeds through, rendering the creature both undeniably present and  absent, the viewer can never truly be sure what they are seeing, a vision, a being, or a hallucination, or, indeed a fantasy. The yellow backdrop for some viewers will inevitably  call to mind Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s classic of the feminist gothic, the short story The  Yellow Wallpaper. Madness, if it is madness one experiences in the gaze of Nezhnaya’s succubus is (at least) a two way street in which the gaze of the viewer inflicts as much  damage on the seen as vice versa.  

ANNA NEZHNAYA, FREEDOM, 2022
 

The power of the gaze, and the dangers it can engender are also a concern in the work  ‘Diese Welt ist ja Irre’ (2023) - translating into English as something like ’This world is  crazy, eh?’. In the work the skull-like image at the centre - curiously living with its  ectoplasmic green eyes inevitably draws associations with the myth of Medusa. The ability  to invert the power of the gaze, to turn it into a weapon from the perspective of the female  subject has offered a potent riposte to the all encompassing colonising impact of the male  gaze; nevertheless in the original story, Nezhnaya’s work seems to remind the viewer,  Medusa can only be beheaded after she is turned to stone by her own reflection in  Perseus’ shield. Power can quickly become weakness. The pain and isolation of Medusa  seems to lie in the foreground of ‘Diese Welt ist ja Irre’. Rendered against a uniformly  black background, instead of snakes a series of arms radiate out against the darkness  towards nothing but the painting’s edge.  

ANNA NEZHNAYA, BATHING DRAGON
 

The longing for connection appears as a theme across Nezhnaya’s works, sometimes  without the ventures into the uncanny or the mythological. For example, ‘Shibari Girl’, a  neon work from (YEAR) depicts a female practitioner of the increasingly popular Japanese rope practice of shibari. The ‘girl’ in question is bound in light, the fundamental subject of  all visual art. She leans out from the ostensibly pleasurable captivity - which the practice is  intended to foster - but her expression is anything but pleased. The anxiety of the  performance of pleasure is a very present aspect of the contemporary experience, whether  that pleasure be based in a sexual realm, largely conditioned by pornography, or in day to  day life. The work hints at a deeper phenomenon underwriting contemporary life, in that  the ‘Shiburu Girl’ hangs in suspension by herself. Shibari as a practice, rather like art itself,  is intrinsically dialogic. One can learn the ropes - and the knots - but one cannot genuinely  do shibari alone. In Nezhnaya’s work the viewer never sees the person who did the tying.  It is perhaps implied that that role is one that can be occupied by the viewer, entailing a  greater or lesser degree of anxiety on their part. Thus the work calls the viewer in, posing  the question of how connection and atomisation function in the contemporary world. Even  when we are most ‘together’, we are often most alone.  

ANNA NEZHNAYA IN HER STUDIO IN BERLIN KREUZBERG, 2024 PHOTO CREDIT: MOISE YOUMBA
 

The boundaries of the personal and the political are always being renegotiated, but increasingly in a moment of widespread global unrest, the personal and the geopolitical  are becoming more profoundly intertwined. The increasingly twisted politics of the Russian Federation under the rule of Vladimir Putin, the site of Nezhnaya’s own coming of age, has  inevitably become a subject for her works, such as in the neon Freedom which depicts  curls of barbed wire glowing in ghostly white. As wires are strung up as affirmations of the  ‘reality’ of borders, Nezhnaya’s wire, with its portability, its illumination and its pseudo cuteness may have at its core a critique of the narrow notions of nationalism that have  permeated Russian discourse, but the work also hints at a deeper interpretation than  simple polemicising. Russian barbed wire may make headlines, but similar wires are being  strung up all throughout the world to justify ostensibly more virtuous forms of national  identities or a general amorphous notion of ‘security’. The allure of the hardened national  border is, the work suggests, not unlike the lure of the flame for the moth, as annihilating  as it is irresistible. 

The age old political tool of satire is also present Nezhnaya’s most overtly political works,  for example, in the painting Mother Russia in which the lofty double-headed eagle of the  Russian coat of arms finds itself bearing a large pair of breasts instead of its familiar  sceptre and orb. The eagle, itself a kind of chimera organism, only becomes more  uncanny and eldritch in Nezhnaya’s reimagining, gesturing towards the bizarre logics of  power, especially as manifested in an increasingly narrow nationalistic vision that excludes  feminist and queer domestic voices as well as an ever-expanding list of ‘foreign agents’ to  be proscribed as threats.  

The art of Anna Nezhnaya explores contemporary femininity through a variety of lenses,  some with tight focus on the personal, some with an expansive view taking in the global  and the geopolitical. Her works are infused with a certain ungovernable current of humour,  but they bespeak predicaments that characterise the feminine experience of the present  which are anything but laughing matters. To explore these works is to face the question of  how such ancient archetypes as Medusa, the succubus, and Eve relate to us today.  Without offering an explicit answer the mere posing of the question allows the viewer to  contemplate how ancient lineages may be overcome and prevented from becoming eternal.  WM