Anika Schwarzlose is a visual artist, researcher, and lecturer. She is currently affiliated with the HKU in Utrecht, where she teaches photography and artistic research.
Her work explores the functioning of archives, the reuse of images, and the role of reproduction techniques in our visual culture. She works with photographic installations, video works, and film, and often collaborates with other artists. Using these lens-based media, she examines how the dissemination, adaptation, and composition of images contribute to the political narratives they promote.
She is currently conducting research into kinships between humans and minerals, machines as technogenic impulse on evolutionary developments, and the relationships between life and non-life. In collaboration with Elena Khurtova, she is developing photochemical processes that interpret and visualise the archival properties of soil.
Venus where her works has been presented include the Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam, Zollverein Essen, ARoS Museum, the Ural Industrial Biennial, Cornell University Art Gallery, Bemis Art Center, W139 Amsterdam, Gallery Format, Nicolai Wallner, V Art Center Shanghai, FOAM, and Fotomuseum Winterthur.
Elena Khurtova is an interdisciplinary artist and researcher. Her work explores the interplay of fragility and resilience of human and environmental conditions, engaging with themes such as care and control, preservation and destruction, memory and its inevitable loss. Her installations—often performative or sculptural in nature—enter into dialogue with image-based media including drawings, artist books, and video.
In her recent projects, Khurtova focuses specifically on human-soil relations. She approaches soil as a living archive, delving into issues of displacement, pollution, and remediation.
Khurtova studied at the University of Architecture in Samara (Russia) and at the Gerrit Rietveld Academie in Amsterdam. In the Netherlands, her work has been presented at institutions including the Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam, Amsterdam Museum, Zone2Source, Looiersgracht 60, Arti et Amicitiae, and the Sonic Acts Biennial. Internationally, her work has been shown at Contemporary Art Centre 3bisF, Manifesta Biennial #13, Musée Magnelli, Atelier Holsboer, Kunsthalle Lottozero, the Korean International Ceramic Biennale, and the Spartanburg Art Museum.
She has been an artist-in-residence at, among others, 3bisF in Aix-en-Provence, Atelier Holsboer in Paris, and the European Ceramic Workcentre (EKWC) in ’s-Hertogenbosch.
