EVENT: ANNA ROTAENKO (OCTOBER 24—NOVEMBER 2025, ONLINE)
Real weapon
digital video (1920 x 1080), color, sound, 18’ 36”, 2018, n/a.
created by Anna Rotaenko
Structured around a twelve-step recovery model, Real Weapon transposes the logic of addiction onto the exhausted figure of the precarious artist. Replacing “God” with “Art” and substituting substance dependency with structural entrapment in late capitalism, the work explores the affective and ideological dead ends of contemporary cultural production. Composed of ambient in-game footage, original music, and real chat transcripts from art communities, Real Weapon unfolds as a digital parable of failure, stasis, and procedural despair. The machinima follows an avatar drifting through the pedestrian margins of Los Santos: rooftops, alleys, empty overpasses. Speech becomes a site of attrition rather than dialogue, and violence is rendered ambient: coded into gestures, edits, and algorithmic repetition. The work mobilises glitch aesthetics, brutal cuts, and visual dissonance to erode the coherence of its own rhetoric.
Anna Rotaenko is a multidisciplinary artist working across video, writing, and sculpture. Her practice engages with the visual and conceptual poetics of alienation, propaganda, and aesthetic saturation, often resulting in installations. Drawing on documentary strategies, digital architecture, and archival research, Rotaenko explores the intersections between urban systems, resource-driven landscapes, and repressed subjectivities. A graduate of the Rodchenko Art School in Moscow (Sergiy Bratkov’s class “Photography, sculpture, video”) , she has exhibited internationally, with solo shows at institutions such as the Moscow Museum of Modern Art and Cité internationale des arts in Paris. Her work has been featured in group exhibitions at La Gaîté Lyrique, and the Ural Industrial Biennial, among others. Rotaenko has been the recipient of numerous fellowships and awards, including residencies at ZKM and Cité Internationale des Arts, and grants from Goethe Institut, Culture Moves Europe and Pro Helvetia. She currently lives and works in Germany.