Anita Groener

Anita Groener’s work asks what it is to be human today; approaching this question through considering how we think of home and displacement within geopolitical realities, while focusing on specific events, their archetypal and psychological resonances. Groener’s work engages with the issue of trauma and loss, transferred through the experience of time and place. Her work seeks to counter what she sees as an emerging collective alienation by encouraging the viewer to walk in the footsteps of a multitude of anonymous people on the move, without a country and without a home.

With growing numbers of people forcibly displaced, Groener’s work Citizenseeks to draw our attention to the inhumane status of refugees as non-citizens with no rights or representation in the country they seek refuge in; titled as such to make the political comment that those who are without country still deserve some kind of agency. Each silhouetted figure Groener has crafted is unique, based on a specific individual in one of the thousands of photographs of displaced people she compiled during research. As a host of figures, they become universal and timeless symbols that suggest the enduring magnitude of the phenomenon. The deliberate modest means of her installations - twigs, cut paper, straight pins, gouache— speak to the fragility of life and society that refugee crises expose.