Exhibition in Dresden: How prefabricated buildings shaped people and cities in East and West MDR KULTUR und ARD Tagesschau, February 28, 2026 (min. 0:00 - 0:55): "A feeling of vertigo grips those who enter the installation entitled PLATTENBAU VERTIGO in the exhibition, created by the internationally acclaimed Berlin artist Annett Zinsmeister, she masterfully condenses facade photographs of the P2 prefabricated building type, an eleven-story structure typical of GDR housing, into a hall of mirrors. Curator Claudia Quiring, curator of architectural history at the Dresden City Museum, calls it a 'surreal spatial experience': 'It is a massive unfolding of the facade of a prefabricated building in white and turquoise. This extends further and further through reflection, and I think not everyone will dare to go in, but those who do will be rewarded...'" >> audio

Special exhibition "Plattenbau Ost/West. Living and Building in Large Panel Construction" at the Dresden City Museum opens in: Sachsen.net, February 27, 2026: "The exhibition offers various approaches to the topic... A playful approach for young and old is offered by the video game Dresden Block Tetris, developed specifically for the exhibition by Sergej Hein; a reversal of inside and outside is offered by the art installation "Plattenbau Vertigo" by Annett Zinsmeister, which is also being shown for the first time and irritates viewing habits through its reversal of inside and outside, top and bottom."

Exhibition "Out of the House" at the Kunsthalle Tübingen by Marc Hellmann in: RTF.1 / TV: Like two giant eyes looking at you, or are they tunnels into another dimension? The new façade on the striking residential high-rise vis-à-vis the Tübingen Kunsthalle stands out not only because of its size, but also with optical illusions that irritate, at the same time fascinate and make you think. It is the work of the Berlin artist Annett Zinsmeister. She deals with the subject of space and architecture and that is what makes the artist so unique in the eyes of curator Nicole Fritz. The work is called "INSIDE_OUT" and is intended to transport the inside to the outside or make it visible. In doing so, the artist, as she herself says, likes to work with architectures that divide minds. The artist has been working on this art project for over a year, which has presented her with one or two challenges. For example, each façade module has a size of 20*6.5 meters and there it is important that the desired effect in the planning of a smaller scale also finally comes into its own, according to the artist. At first glance, it resembles works in Op-Art, which create optical illusions and effects by stringing together geometric shapes. But the artist and architect has her very own way of creating works of art: "first of all a documentary one - I document the architecture photographically. I deal very intensively with the history of the house, with the architecture, the space. It's not a graphic work that works with effects like in Op Art, but what I'm very interested in - which also plays a role in Op Art - is perception, visual perception. How can I reproduce three-dimensionality on a two-dimensional plane and what does that do to us." In the Tübingen façade work, Zinsmeister worked with inversions, meaning that one façade is the negative image of the other two modules. For one year, the artwork is now visible to everyone.

Exterior installation by Annett Zinsmeister in Tübingen by Armin Knauer in: Reutlinger General-Anzeiger (21.5.21): "Artist Annett Zinsmeister brings the inside to the outside at the high-rise building on the [area] Wanne. It is the second exterior work commissioned by the Kunsthalle on the high-rise building..." more informnation will follow

Annett Zinsmeister now in the castle. MoMa bought two works for the collection of Ute Bekeschus in: The Hellersdorfer June.2021: "In the current show "Time Change" in the castle of Berlin - Biesdorf Annett Zinsmeister is the only artist represented with a work, which was created directly for the event and also has a local reference, namely to the large housing estates of the district. Octagonal and at the center of the exhibition, a 6.5-meter-high textile installation in the castle permeates the rotunda from the skylight dome through the gallery to the first floor. The imprinted skyscraper view shows countless floors, uniformly structured by joints, panels and windows [...] But at the core of her success and Annett Zinsmeister's good name are her creativity, which flows in various directions, a special perseverance and ability to concentrate, a versatile curiosity and a natural charm in dealing with people. It is no wonder that the artist has already served on many professional committees, that she has given a large number of lectures, and that she is also active as a scientist in the field of teaching. [...] Half-measures do not suit her, this is revealed by a look at the impressive artist's vita alone. Her works have been shown in twice as many exhibitions as the number of years she has been working. In 2015, the renowned New York art museum MoMa even knocked on her door to exhibit a work on the subject of prefabricated concrete slabs and - Zinsmeister's general motif - on the subject of space. According to her design, they built a large space in faraway America. The museum also bought two Zinsmeisters for its own collection."

Kunsthalle Tübingen transforms high-rise building. Art project "Inside_Out" by Annett Zinsmeister by Tobias Ignée in: SWR Aktuell: "On a total area of twenty by just under seven meters each, huge octagons taper in different shades of gray. This creates the impression that the viewer is looking down into a black hole, or up into the sky. The idea behind the irritating optical illusion: to direct the viewer's gaze from the outside to the inside and from the inside to the outside. The template for Annett Zinsmeister's three-dimensional spatial experience is a photograph of the atrium inside the building. Using a complicated digital process, Zinsmeister has distorted the photo of the atrium to such an extent that it is almost impossible to tell whether the image is a photograph, painting or graphic. Hybrid is what she calls her technique. She sent the result to a special company, which transferred it to wind-permeable fabric sheets weighing about 50 kilograms. " >> Article in German

Huge holes in the facade of the house. Annett Zinsmeister has turned the inside of a Tübingen high-rise building inside out with a photo installation by Adrienne Göhler in: Stuttgarter Zeitung and Stuttgarter Nachrichten: "Gigantic photographs now stretch over seven floors, showing what normally only the residents get to see: the stairwell. It is stuck in the middle of the building and leads around atriums. The way Annett Zinsmeister photographed it from the bottom up, the result looks as if there is a big hole in the facade of the apartment building. ... In her photographs, the artist has visually dissected many a prefabricated building and built sophisticated three-dimensional spaces from the exterior views. The idiosyncratic spatial constructions often appear futuristic; the eye gets lost in them as in a labyrinth. Some of her installations can even be walked through. With her computer structures, Annett Zinsmeister has made it into the collection of the New York Museum of Modern Art. Light becomes dark, exterior becomes interior...The cool, abstract-looking, almost black-and-white transformations of the stairwell raise all sorts of questions: how humans live, build, or experience architecture." >> Article in German

Tyranny of the grid. Annett Zinsmeister's architectural landscapes immediately cast a spell on the public by Georg Leisten in: Stuttgarter Zeitung, Art +Culture, 16.11.2018: "The buildings are in Berlin or Paris, but actually they could be anywhere. In her photographic montages, Annett Zinsmeister assembles soberly functionalist facades into strange spatial fictions. The architectural face of a social dystopia in which the dictatorship of the grid has displaced sky and horizon is formed from the serial order of the window axes and the rows of floors. Annett Zinsmeister, born in 1967 and former academy professor at the Stuttgart Art Academy, has even made it into the collection of the New York Museum of Modern Art with her modernist ghost towns. In Stuttgart, where current works by the artist can be seen, the architectural landscapes immediately captivate the visitor. For it is the beauty of the terrible that opens up there. Coldly glowing large-format slides or photographic wallpaper create endless spaces: prefabricated buildings flush into the depths and even ensilage the sky. (...) Even the doors that open here and there promise no way out. They only reinforce the labyrinthine feeling that all the futuristic purposes could be connected by secret passageways."  >> article in German

Space. Fragment. Formation by Nicole Carina Fritz / Kunst + Kultur / Gatzani Verlag Blog:   "Prefabricated buildings, brutalism architecture or gloomy industrial plants are generally not regarded as attractive places to feel good. Nevertheless, Annett Zinsmeister whose works are also represented in the MoMA, manages to elicit a unique aesthetic from these architectural variations by staging building details like surreal mosaics or constructing fantastic set pieces from them with a very special eye. (...) With her art, Annett Zinsmeister makes the serial individual, almost essential. Particularly in large format, numerous photographs by the Stuttgart-born and Berlin-based artist and professor unfold a kind of pulling effect that literally draws the viewer into the pictorial pattern. Other motifs constantly let the viewer's gaze wander over the entire format - somehow it must be recognizable, the structure that holds everything together and allows us to draw conclusions about the big picture as a whole. „Space. Fragment. Formation“ seems like an ex-hibition "between magnification and wide angle" - this is exactly how the isolated spatial fragments, steel construction puzzles, window and façade patterns and site specific space installation present themselves. Massive. Exciting. Confusing." >> article in German

Space. Fragment. Formation by Annett Zinsmeister Text by Idzumi Neumärker, FB, 29.10.2018: "Yesterday at the preview of "Space. Fragment. Formation by Annett Zinsmeister" in Stuttgart. What I expected: Clear concepts, lines, structures, precise geometries. New perspectives (of course). Fields of tension between narrowness and vastness, rhythms, boundaries and freedom. Elegance and perfection that seem so effortless that it must be extremely hard work. (...) what I didn't expect: Light and lightness create a magic that immediately fascinates me. Each work allows me to travel into a world of my own that is strange and, if you know the cities, at the same time reflects their familiar character. Emotion, warmth and liveliness unfold behind the precise contours and cool surfaces. This is fascinating. And it is joie de vivre without obtrusiveness, perhaps one's own projection, but perhaps not either, everyone may conduct this dialogue for himself with his favorite work. And again and again this special light, even in the works that are not light works. The spatial installations reinforce this effect, the exhibition is designed by master craftsmen. Conclusion: Going there. Let it be captured. If possible: Invest." >> article in German

Three vernissages with !!!  in: stuttgart art blog, 28.10.2018: "The partly very extensive works of the Annett Zinsmeister ... that show in very many details architectural buildings, forms, lines, construction carriers etc., are strikingly direct, straight and radiate in their way. Not only wallpaper-sized, but also backlit in a square, the world of angles seems abstract and yet real to us. In response to our question: why these rectangular, mostly industrial forms? the charming Stuttgart born artist told us how she found a reference to especially these forms; in the 90s, immediately after the fall of the Berlin Wall, she saw and experienced the prefabricated buildings in East Berlin. As an architect and artist, she analyzed, perceived and dedicated these forms to the essentials. No wonder that these works were created; we are not necessarily the biggest fans of industrial "art" or works on this theme: often to cold, to monotonous, to boring. Not so with Zinsmeisters art works. They are carrying life... Don't miss it and visit the exhibition." >> article in German

Confronting the Future in TAGESSPIEGEL 26.05.2018 "Annett Zinsmeister brachte eine künslterische Perspektive ein. In ihren Arbeiten beschäftigte sie sich mit Plattenbausiedlungen und der Vielfalt, die das Baukastenprinzip bieten könne. Sie sei überzeugt davon, dass serielles,industrielles Bauen ein grosses gestalterisches - und bisher oft nicht umgesetztes - Potential in sich trage... Vorraussetzung dafür sei Offenheit gegenüber dieser Art des Bauens." >> article (deutsch)

Arte y estructura in cosas.pe, 24.10.2017: "This exhibition synthesizes some recurrent obsessions in contemporary art. The German artist Annett Zinsmeister -included in the MoMA collection- presents a set of surreal mosaics, constructed from the juxtaposition of images; while the British Sol Bailey Barker exhibits some of his most emblematic geometric sculptures, and the Puerto Rican Gamaliel Rodríguez, a disturbing series of large format acrylics. The local representative Augusto Ballardo, on the other hand, has built an abstract series with pre-Hispanic influences. "Concrete spaces" is exhibited until November 24 at the Impakto Gallery" >> article (spanisch)

“Espacios Concretos” en la Galería Impakto in:TV robles Peru 17.10.2017: "Next Wednesday, October 11, the exhibition "Concrete Spaces" will be inaugurated at the Impakto Gallery... four artists who move in the thin border that exists between art and structure. Annett Zinsmeister creates fictitious architectural landscapes, sometimes with a monumentality that reminds us of brutalist buildings and, in others, with the opacity typical of gloomy industrial workshops. Thus, and from the juxtaposition of photographic images, the artist diagrams utopian, surreal mosaics. Her work has been part of the public collection of the MoMA Museum of Modern Art (New York, USA)." >> article (spanisch)

Art Scene celebrates season start in Bonn 2017 by Thomas Kliemann, in: Generalanzeiger Bonn 18.09.2017: "As in the past years, the start of the season in 2017 provided interesting insights, offered plenty of conversation - and an impression of the differentiated offer of the Bonn art scene, that offers also the political in the program such as award-winning films (videonals in the art museum), the aesthetic analyzes of panel constructions by Annett Zinsmeister (society for art and design), the contemplative, fascinating art of Dirk Salz (Kunstraum 21) or the format- and space-spreading force, Max Frisinger and Felix Oehmann unfold in the wonderful rooms of the Galerie Gisela Clement. >> Article

"Plattenbau" as a series of works by Annett Zinsmeister by Gudrun von Schoenebeck in: Generalanzeiger Bonn 10.08.2017: "BONN Annett Zinsmeister's researches on the architecture of the GDR flowed into an exhibition of the Bonn society for art and design: In the photographically constructed rooms by Annett Zinsmeister the view is wandering along ornamental structures, registers details and searches for meaningful connections. Here - this is immediately obvious, a deconstruction took place in which architectural details from the built world were recombined and transformed into a special world of images. Behind an aesthetized, formally strict and initially cool facade, the artist deals with questions of the identity of spaces and places. ... The solo show, in which the Gesellschaft für Kunst und Gestaltung (gkg) is currently presenting several works series of Zinsmeister, is like a journey between magnifying glass and wide-angle. "Plattenbau" is such an exciting series, based on a sociologically motivated curiosity." >> article in German

Exhibition in Munich: Annett Zinsmeister - Urban Shelter? by Claudia Rinne in: Architektur aktuell 26.2.2017 p.14-15: „In her one-woman show in the Munich gallery BNKR (a former WW II bunker) German artist Annett Zinsmeister uses installations, projections and interventions to pose a highly topical question about the way in which shelter is formed today. Annett Zinsmeister found in the gallery an "ideal place to illuminate questions of protection, shelters and their transience". Within four months, she conceived the exhibition "Urban Shelter? with works adapted to the rooms and newly developed. For years Zinsmeister has used optical basic modules, which she distils from her documentary photographs of prefabricated building facades, for installations. The outside of the houses, which has been prepared in series, collaged and abstracted by manipulation of proportions, is stuck into an interior space by surface design and rebuilds it as it were. The result is a confusing spatial experience, especially since the ceiling, sometimes also the floor, and the walls are treated equally. [...] If one follows the artist's recommendation, one first descends into the basement rooms. Directly after the Bosnian war, in 1996, she went to the former front and photographed destroyed houses. She has technically alienated some of these photographs and added them to the room-high "Lost Homes" projection, in which the objects are superimposed and seem to be illuminated by searchlights. The changing light of this projection illuminates a matt-coated niche that seems to lead deeper into the bunker. A two meter wide sand surface on the ground is a 1:1 projection of the wall thickness of the bunker, and at the same time a projection surface for plans of real and ideal cities. The plans have no clear scale relationship and become patterns that show how the city moves away from its beginnings as a fenced-in shelter and spreads out. On the ground floor, large-format slides in light boxes, whose perspective illusion seems to point to a fourth dimension, play with the spaces. The ground floor zone receives daylight only through two areas in which the rooms have been extended to the first upper floor. The geometry of the high-lying window openings seems as if Annett Zinsmeister had planned them especially for this purpose". >> article in German

Escape to the inner Security by Evelyn Vogel, in:Süddeutsche Zeitung, 6./7.1.2017: "arbitrary attacks on people in subway stations and terrorist attacks such as on the Berlin Christmas market, is currently being debated in Germany above all over control of public space. For this reason, the question of the protection of civilians in the urban area is more relevant than ever before, as the curators of the BNKR art space, which is located in a converted bunkers from the Second World War, saw far-sighted. For this reason, too, they invited the artist, Annett Zinsmeister, who had been working on shelters for years. The Berlin artist is questioning the protection of people from the Middle Ages to the present day, incorporating different dangers and changing technological possibilities into their reflections. She also points out that while the society is debating much about highly-technological and digitized disputes, most wars are still managed with conventional weapons. ...

She is able to achieve a broadly diverse application of the topics with various media such as photography, film, collage and installation. A projection is devoted to medieval fortifications and the genealogy of cities as shelters, which are superimposed on the sand: drafts of ideal cities and utopian city visions. Light boxes on the ground floor have emerged from the container project "Urban Hacking" and are aimed primarily at visual perception of space and emotional confusion. There you are then faced with a flat image, the spatial simulation of which is so deceptive as to be thought of. Zinsmeister knows: Deception has a lot to do with tolerance. We often see what we want to see.

The most striking feature of the large room installation through which one arrives is the exhibition: photographs of prefabricated buildings that seem to resemble each other like an egg. The individuality of the inhabitants can be seen behind every window, but through the photomontage, Zinsmeister creates a confusing place which, in its uniformity, can still surpass reality. How much protection does this urbanity radiate? Prefabricated buildings as private shelters belong to the early themes of the artist, which is now represented at important biennials and in large museum collections. She has devoted herself to spaces of protection for more than 20 years. In view of the increasing discussion about protection in the public, urban area, it is guaranteed that she will continue to deal with this topic for a long time." >> article in German

Istanbul’s third Design Biennial explores the human imprint byMaria Cristina Didero in: domus 3.11.2016: "The walls, floor and ceiling of this gallery space have been covered by artist Annett Zinsmeister in wallpaper digitally printed with hundreds of tower block windows. By turning the exterior of a building inwards, Zinsmeister brings the viewers attention to the way that we personalise our domestic space, posing questions about communication and social interactions. >> article

Knowledge up to the Ceiling by Georg Leisten: "Medieval or media modernism? As a former grain store, the Kornhaus in Kirchheim under Teck has always been designed for the tasks of storage, today the building is a museum and collects quite different things. Exactly with this change of function Annett Zinsmeister started to work. The artist and professor draw a bow from the preservation of the agrarian period, to the grain chambers of the 21st century: the archives and databases.

Zinsmeisters´projections transform the display cabinets, which can be viewed from the outside, into a sliding sequence in which libraries and large-scale computers alternate with pre-industrial wood architecture. The entrance area, an installation designed by the artist, is also paved by gray file folders - from floor to ceiling. Memory temples from data material, which however (in contrast to the libraries of a well-known photo series by Candida Höfer) remain abstract. Zinsmeister's series of boxes and slipcases emphasize the grid as the law of modern spatial structure.

This functionalism, however, increases to new sublimity. Amazingly, the viewer loses himself in the virtual convertions, whose computers or shelf-meters seem to be flush miles down into the depths. This illustrates the historical as well as the present - conscious installation in the Kornhaus, as the philosophical godfather of archivethought, Michel Foucault, stated: "The things to be known are infinite." >> article

Games with mirrors and light by Thomas Volkmann in: SZBZ 5.11.2016: "The Museum Ritter presents with" Spatial Miracles" seven present-day artists: the question of space in the art of modern times focused primarily on the perspective representation of space. Of the past century, new art forms such as installations, conceptual and light art have opened up new horizons and expanded beyond the creative and constructive moment to include social, virtual and interactive aspects. In the Museum Ritter this goes so far that visitors can formally enter into works of art. In the case of the screening room of the Annett Zinsmeister, born in Leinfelden-Echterdingen and now living in Berlin, the first thing to be done is felt slippers. Zinsmeister creates a room on the upper floor of the museum, which has "invaded" existing architectural features. She transferred the pattern of the square-shaped light blanket into the three-dimensional space, which has now become a work of art in the shimmering latex white with its delicate, glossy white laminate."

From fruitcast to spatial installation by Gunther Nethin in: Stuttgarter Zeitung 3.11.2016: "The internationally renowned artist Annett Zinsmeister will be showing her unusual works on" Memory / Transformation "until the 27th of November at the Municipal Gallery Kornhaus. Spaces have always attracted artists - even if only as a place where their works can be presented in the right light. Annett Zinsmeister, however, has chosen spaces as objects of art, and recorded and documented the changing purposes of the buildings. In Kirchheim's mighty fruit box from 1553, in which the Municipal Gallery is housed alongside the Museum, the once-purpose functional link is obvious. And so the space installations of the artist are under the sign "Tank/Transformation"... A closed cube with the comparable dimensions of a load elevation has been installed in the entrance area of?the gallery, which with its strict all-round parceling and numbering takes up the storage momentum and suggests the view into a magazine or a library fundus. Other areas can be viewed from outside around the clock, since they are projection surfaces behind the gallery windows. Here one means to recognize whole bearing shells, scaffolding constructions and supporting beam rows in exact structural alignment.

Annett Zinsmeister born in Stuttgart, studied art and architecture as well as cultural and media sciences in Berlin. Since 2003, she has been a professor... Her artistic work can be found in the New York Museum of Modern Art, as well as in outstanding collections of Paris, Vienna and Istanbul. It is therefore no wonder that Kirchheim's mayor, Angelika Matt-Heidecker, spoke of a "great honor and joy" for the city, with a view to the high-profile references of Zinsmeistes at the vernissage."

Istanbul’s third Design Biennial explores the human imprint byAli Morris in: wallpaper 24.10.2016: "The walls, floor and ceiling of this gallery space have been covered by artist Annett Zinsmeister in wallpaper digitally printed with hundreds of tower block windows. By turning the exterior of a building inwards, Zinsmeister brings the viewers attention to the way that we personalise our domestic space, posing questions about communication and social interactions. Photography: Sahir Ugur Eren >> article

The Art goes to the City by Elisabeth Kanski in: Teckbote 19.10.2016: "Annett Zinsmeister creates the soloshow and art installation "Tank/Transformation" at the Kornhaus in Kirchheim, and many art - lovers were able to experience this work of art at the vernissage. The opening ceremony took place outside the Kornhaus with a sect reception, so that passers-by were always present, so something that Lord Mayor Angelika Matt-Heidecker had long desired: Art finally comes out into the city. It is no coincidence that the artist places the viewer of her work in front of the Kornhaus, as the artistic director of the Kunstverein Esslingen Christian Gögger emphasized in his introduction. The space installation at the interface between art and architecture is integrated into the Kornhaus and draws attention to this space and its history. Thus, the title refers in several respects to the grain house, which was used until 1851 as grain storage and now "stores" museum pieces ... What kind of goods the memory could contain in the changing projections and what exactly the accessible space represents with its seemingly infinite recurring pattern actually remains open. In addition to the work of art, Christian Gögger also described the artistic career of Annett Zinsmeister, who began with photography and developed increasingly into large installations and employment with changing rooms. Through exhibitions in Nürtingen and Stuttgart the artist born in Stuttgart is known in the region. However, she is also exhibiting her works in the great public collections of the world, for example in the Museum of Modern Art in New York or in the art collection of the Bundestag in Berlin. The spatial scenarios between fiction and reality, designed by her, allow her viewers to discover the stories and socio-cultural backgrounds of the documented spaces." >> Artikel

Between Reality and Fiction by pm in: Teckbote 07.10.2016: "Berlin artist Annett Zinsmeister works with space, exploring and documenting spaces of change, revealing their stories and transforming them into subtle or spectacular spatial scenarios that invite us to a journey of discovery between reality and fiction. In the Kornhaus, Annett Zinsmeister has developed a walk-in room installation. "Virtual Interiors" is the work of the artist, where she mostly transforms exhibition venues by deconstructing architectural elements such as façades and recomposing them into new spaces. The illusory but also accessible rooms escape the categories of interior and exterior, from above and below, and offer the visitors an experimental space experience in a literally "inverted world". Annett Zinsmeister's works are shown internationally in exhibitions such as New York, Paris, Vienna, Istanbul and Lima."

Urban Shelter. Solo Show by Annett Zinsmeister in a Bunker in Munich in: baunetz 30.09.2016: "Civil war, terror or cyber war - the threats of today are real but also abstract, especially as long as they do not seem to concern us directly. Bunkers as shelters in our urban neighborhood have lost their original function, but they evoke the question: How is protection developed today? The exhibition rooms BNKR are located in a Munich high bunker from 1943 and thus form the ideal background for the exhibition "Urban Shelter?" by Annett Zinsmeister, which was opened yesterday. In installations, projections and interventions, the artist deals with the history, meaning and transience of Shelters."

The Otherworldly Modern Homes that Were Never Built by hyperallergic Allison Meier in: on February 18, 2016: " Michael Rakowitz’s polyethylene “paraSITE homeless shelter” (1997) inflates on one wall, and Annett Zinsmeister’s “Virtual Interior MoMA white” (2007/2015), with its photographic wallpaper of Plattenbau housing windows, acts as a distracting selfie-magnet." >> article

Annett Zinsmeister at Nery Marino Gallery - Virtual interior Paris by Nathalie Morgado in: Galleriemoi Paris, February 15, 2016: "We love video art and we are always happy to promote. For this reason we invite you to visit this time NMarino gallery. There Berlin artist Annett Zinsmeister is presenting an impression until 20 February 2016, a very unique and spectacular video installation that plays with our perception: Ephemeral and virtual spaces pass in front of our eyes, the spaces occur, disappear, reappear, become ... It is refine, beautiful and intriguing. The architectural dimension is very present in this installation, which is not surprising because the artistic process Annett Zinsmeister has focused on is the intersection between art and architecture. She is specialized in the construction of large-scale installations as you can see some documented examples in the gallery Marino in addition to the video installation. The artist is inspired by the architcture in different countries, with their austere structures, geometrical. The viewer is immersed in the work. Another line of Annett Zinsmeister's work is to reflect on the transformation of our urban space. That's why she works extensively with modular systems. Currently her actuality is very rich because in addition to being present in the gallery Marino, her commissioned installation "Virtual Interior MoMA white", is currently presented in the exhibition Endless House of Intersections Art and Architecture until March 6, 2016 at MoMA - Museum of Modern Art New York." >> article in french

Explore the concept of Endless House at the MoMA by AFine Lyne in: untapped cities.com, New York January 26, 2016: "Annett Zinsmeister, another artist in the Endless Home exhibit, attempts to magnify human perception and everyday habits, surrounding us with windows adorned in every conceivable form of treatment. While some have found the installation to exude loneliness, others might also sense the urban quality of a building family – window treatments hung decades ago, leaving your imagination to roam about those that might occupy each space in a sea of boxed spaces that make up our city. Virtual Interior is a photographic portrayal of such a familiar New York City sight that as visitors entered the room, they were drawn to the three-sided digitally printed wallpaper installation, slowly entering the doorway to stand and contemplate each of the walls." >> article

Warm Your Artistic Soul This Season: 10 Must-See Winter Art Exhibits in NYC by Astrid Sarmiento in: Spoiled New York, January 14, 2016: "This rad exhibition at the MoMA, located in the third floor, highlights and celebrates the history of art and architectural design. [...] Works by architects and artists spanning more than seven decades can be found at the “Intersections of Art and Architecture.” The digital 3D pop-up printed installation of the “Endless House” from German artist Annett Zinsmeister is one of the many that you will find alongside other talented and creative individuals." >> article

New York/Ocean of Images by Brian Rose in: Journal, January 15, 2016: "I wandered into another gallery, this one an exhibition called Endless House about the concept of “house” using drawings, photographs, models, and films, and I was enthralled by all of it. There was also an immersive and disorienting photo environment by Annett Zinsmeister, a repeating window pattern of a highrise housing project that could be walked in, and on." >> article

Museum selfie day 2016 - Highlights in pictures selected by The Guardian, New York January 14, 2016

MoMA exhibition highlights how artists have used the house as a means to explore universal topics in:artdaily.org, NEW YORK, NY 07/09/2015: "In the 1920s, Frederick Kiesler started to sketch designs for an “endless architecture” that would collapse the boundaries between art and architecture. His investigations led him in the late 1940s to the Endless House, a single-family residence that was both a never-ending design process and a manifesto for a new approach to dwelling.[...] As a familiar presence in our everyday lives, tied to the experience of belonging, the house plays a large role in the popular imagination. In the works displayed along these walls, artists emphasize the complex social, political, and cultural meanings the house embodies as an archetypal space that mediates our relationship to the world. In doing so, they often turn to recognizable architectural types— the pitched roof, the suburban lawn, the Victorian terraced house—so as to address shared values. Martha Rosler and Sigmar Polke draw on popular media to explore the house as a symbol of a middle-class, consumer-driven lifestyle. Works by Louise Bourgeois, Sandile Goje, and Laurie Simmons mine the cultural and gender roles that characterize domestic life. Performance acts by Gordon Matta-Clark, Rachel Whiteread, and Alex Schweder and Ward Shelley publicly invert and make visible private interiors. Thomas Schütte and Kevin Appel borrow existing architectural elements and styles to imagine houses for new kinds of purposes. Wearable, portable, and inflatable shelters by Lucy Orta, Andrea Zittel, and Michael Rakowitz, respectively, highlight the precariousness of a fixed definition of home given today’s conditions of global migration and urban instability.

Recent acquisitions by the Museum’s Department of Architecture and Design present contemporary approaches to ideas of dwelling. New York-based practice Asymptote Architecture is inspired by mathematical models and the seamless geometries of yachts, cars, and airplanes. Similarly to Kiesler’s Endless House, their proposal for a single-family house near Helsinki culminated a design process in which organic forms evolved through film sets and furniture designs into an experimental architectural expression. Chilean architect Smiljan Radic ´ designed Casa para el Poema del Ángulo Recto through a process of bricolage, using forms drawn from different artistic practices. The house combines a reinforced concrete vault inspired by a print by Le Corbusier with a fragrant cedar-lined interior that Radic ´ tested in an earlier installation. In contrast, German artist and architect Annett Zinsmeister creates environments using images of the facades of Plattenbau— housing made in the former German Democratic Republic with inexpensive, prefabricated concrete panels. Not unlike SITE, whose work is also displayed here, she employs the visual logic of massproduced housing systems to create a disturbing spatial experience that comments on the utopian vision of a home." >> article

Endless House: experimental archetypes of dwelling in: The Architectural Review: "German artist Annett Zinsmeister creates virtual environments out of representations of existing Plattenbau facades—housing estates in the former German Democratic Republic built cheaply and quickly using a construction system of large, prefabricated concrete panels. By inverting this modular facade system to create new spatial scenarios, she comments on its historically embedded utopian vision of a home for everyone." >> article

Elogio al Mestizaje in: Cosas Perú  07/2015; "La exposición „Revisiones“ indiga en la hibridez del arte contemporáneo a partir del trabajo del artista chino Wan Liya, la alemana Annett Zinsmeister a la peruanas Ananú Gonzales-Posada y Sandra Rizo Patrón entre otros creadores. Va hasta el 7 de agosto.

Ni bendición, ni castigo. Si algo parece haber hecho la globlización con el arte contemporáneo – más allá de los debates – es convertirlo en uno de sus hijos mestizos por excelencia. Un ser mutante, capaz de fusionar lenguates e imaginarios que parecian condenados al olvido von las bûsquedas interdisciplinarias de un tiempo marcado por la inmediatez. Es a es la premisa que ha seguido „Revisiones“, una exposición colectiva que se presenta Galería Impakto hasta el 7 de agosto, en la que se reúnen algunas de las tendencias artisitcas más plurales para conformar una metáfora de nuestros días. ... Un segundo núcleo de la muestra gira en torno la transformación del espacio y la ilusión de lo real, mediante al acercamiento multisdisciplinario de un grupo de artistas como el surcoreano Seung Mo Park, la alemana Annett Zinsmeister, el estadounidense Michael de Lucia, y el chileno Pablo Jansana." >> article in spain

"The Art Fold" in Freiburg in: Badische Zeitung, Culture 26.03.2015: "At Kunstraum Alexander Bürkle, Robert-Bunsen-Straße 5 the exhibition "The Art of Fold" will be shown until 21st June with different contemporary positions, that deal with the topic of the fold. Based in the collection of Ege-Foundation there are more than 40 artists represented with paintings, sculpture, video and photography. Our pictures shows a work by Annett Zinsmeister." >> article in german

Space is change: Data.Grid.Space.Modules works by Annett Zinsmeister in: Stuttgarter Nachrichten Culture 02/25/2015: "When the show this Wednesday at Galería Impakto in the Peruvian capital Lima" Teknology "will open, there are also works by 1967 born artist Annett Zinsmeister to be seen in. This week there is a much more convenient way to approach Annett Zinsmeisters oeuvre. A selection of new works can be seen from this Friday at the premises of the technology service provider SSC in Böblingen: „Art and architecture, utopias and the cultural character and transformation of Space and everyday objects are central themes which Annett Zinsmeister renegotiate in her artistic works, in installations, conceptual and built spaces, in photographs, drawings and collages, in film and in texts ".Daten.Raster.Raum. Module" is the exhibition by Annett Zinsmeister titled who had been Professor of Stuttgart Art Academy until 2013. At the opening Nikolai B.Forstbauer,Culture Resort leader of our newspaper introduces into the artist´s work oeuvre".

Unreal Spaces: "scenarios of the uncanny" at Kunstverein Neuhausen by Elke Eberle in: Esslinger Zeitung, 03.06.2014: "In the confessional room waits Joseph Roth, architects put on an entity like from another world on an existing home, a boy obsesses in his anxiety and a drone records everything. "Scenarios of the Uncanny in art, technology and architecture" currently investigating by the Kunstverein Neuhausen in the profane Rupert Mayer chapel. Whimsical, surreal, strange and shocking tell these scenarios stories of outer and inner uncanny scenarios. About the former altar 4 lightboxes represent four scenarios of destruction from the series "Lost homes" by Annett Zinsmeister. At the end of the Bosnian war the artist had been from 1996 several times in Sarajevo and Mostar, and documented the devastation there. In the exhibition are four light objects in large format on display, negatives show once flourishing and after the war completely devastated habitats. Annett Zinsmeister manages to find a contemporary visual language and imagery, that opens awareness for the dire consequences and the horrors of war, destruction, death and expulsion, where in the world ever. She also developed surreal spaces in her installations made by photographs of housing facades. By photographs of these installations, arise unreal space structures developed from the two-dimensionality in unreal additional rooms. The penitent hasn´t it very comfortable in the confessional: as a discourse on the phenomenon of confession Zinsmeister put a small library in situ that may grow."

In view of the prying eyes of the camera Dietrich Heißenbüttel in: Stuttgarter Zeitung, 06.23.2014: "An exhibition at the Kunstverein Neuhausen addressed in many ways the uncanny ... [Also] in black and white shows Annett Zinsmeister, who has traveled to Bosnia in 1996, in the series "Lost Homes" destroyed homes. She also filmed on her journey: The camera pans over destroyed dwellings in Mostar and Sarajevo The rattle of the projector, the lint in the artwork seem to emphasize the authenticity. Another work Zinsmeisters refers directly to the exhibition space, the former Jesuit chapel: in the confessional are placed as an expandable installation books that deal with the subject of confession. From Giordano Bruno via Tolstoy up to a "confession of a young girl, by Mademoiselle Sappho.”

Scenarios of the uncanny by Susanne Jacob in: Kunstverein Neuhausen, 24/05/2014: "Another aspect of the spatialization of the uncanny, linked with existential fear (death, homelessness, etc.), and the sensation of horror, shows the S / W series" Lost homes"by Annett Zinsmeister, which was created in 1996 after the end of the war in Bosnia. In this series of photographs, the artist documented the destruction of the urban war landscape and reinforces the impression of horror by inversion of the photo positive. During her stay in Sarajevo and Mostar 1996 originated also a Super 8 film, which is written in the style of a "tourist" diary, but not sights spectacular, but the desolation of war landscape documented. In the series "outside-in / Virtual Interiors 2009, however, faceless mass architectures of the post-socialist are and post-capitalist society, transformed by the addition, mirroring and rotation to a threatening sucking throat of houses.

Confession Library A work "in situ" and "in progress": In a further study, Annett Zinsmeister directly concerned with the architectural and functional requirements of the former Jesuit chapel. In two confession cells she inititated a "confession" library where one may "read" in peace and own thoughts about confession or also own confessions may be written on the wall. The "Confession Library" will continue after the exhibition end to be listed by visitors to the Art Association and supplemented by other books and movies. ">> link

Deconstruction - Recombination: Annett Zinsmeister by Martin Püschel in: www.jeder square meter you: “Around the studio of the artist Annett Zinsmeister, more motives of her works for videos, installations, etc. can be found - the facades show openly their grid as office or apartment buildings, or as place of future demolition. The geometry defines the architectural structure, with the methods in art one can get to the bottom of this. The grid of facades, especially in prefabricated buildings, shows the repetition, the serial principle however. The people between the grid are as individual as the different structures of the walls, between which they move. The repetition reinvents itself again and again. In Annett Zinsmeisters works merge art and architecture, and the module plays an important role. The "space" is released from its traditional context, dissolved and combined to form new structures - the works of the artist challenge the perception of our as given taken environment. Particularly impressive are Annett Zinsmeisters conceptual and built spaces, which she constructed from singular serial modules. Deconstruction and recombination and the examination with utopias and the identity of architecture and space ">> link in german

Plattenköpfe Annett Zinsmeister video portrait by jeder-qm-du 2013 on youtube since 2014: "Finally an intelligent and creative engagement with the Topic Plattenbau - instead of the usual" platitudes." Wilfried Schaus-Sahm

Art and / or Design? Interview with czech designer Iva Š. Tattermuschová / Tablo: "What book do you have on the bedside table? Lately, I have little time for reading, and I'm sorry. I have more books beside my bed. Either I already started to read, or it is a kind of eternal declaration of what I would like to read. I started to read Art and / or Design? edited by Annett Zinsmeister." >> Interview

Plattenbau as artistic Blueprint by Jeannine Fiedler, in:. Prefabricated buildings in Berlin, Hg Ulrich Giersch, Berlin 2013, p.81: "The three-dimensionality of exemplarily selected works leaves, no matter how strongly reduced, never the full-scale external view of the prefabricated building. The artist Annett Zinsmeister manages by the clever trick of lifting familiar visual exercises, to convert the"Platte" into unknown perception spheres. She uses photographs of prefabricated facades as wallpaper reports for complete interiors, letting the users of these new Interior Design sensations crash into tumbling vortex. The exterior is putted over the interior, any maintenance seems lost, the laws of gravity have become invalid. The architecture of the prefabricated modules, in East and West devised on graph paper, dismisses the user as facade climbing Alien in a baseless architecture. "

Review of "Ethics in Aesthetics" by Annett Zinsmeister in: LOVELY BOOKS, 03/2013: "Is it possible to find ethical values ??in Art? Can you educate a society to good taste? How can Art be used as an intermediary for ethical values, and how can our future be made ethically and aesthetically? These are questions in the published anthology by Annett Zinsmeister according to a correspondent symposium in Stuttgart [...] Overall, the book made a good round envelope to reveal the diverse links of moral ideas and artistic expression and is written legibly. [ ...] Also the creative character of the book that can be read in English and German and designed discreetly with pictures is very good. "

Ethics and aesthetics. Morale at a distance by Philip Hindahl in: artifact. Magazine for young art history and art, 01/04/2013 "A connection between ethics and aesthetics ends in an aesthetic disaster, so it seems to be the consensus in the art system since modernism. Will morality in Art having a comeback? A conference volume explores the relationship between the sensual and the moral, between fear of an heteronomy of art and an art that trusts itself criticism."

The Design of Perception. Finding identities between freedom and limitation, aesthetics and ethics. www.tgm-online.de, 01/2013 "Is there an identity of urban life? What happens if the outside is put into the interior, utopias are built on sand or concrete panels suddenly find themself on a wallpaper? Annett Zinsmeister is a free and inquiring mind, she is an artist and architect, author and professor. And: She wants to know exactly what she is working on. With soft voice and a keen mind she reports an intensive examination of her environment, sometimes putting the world or environment upside down, or placing it in a new manner in space, she is dissecting spaces and dreams of life and places them in new aesthetic contexts.
Zinsmeister works not only at the edges of disciplines – light-footed as well as sure-footed she operates in the middle of ever-changing contexts. Intellectual reflection and practical art, architecture and philosophy, culture and media theory: In these border crossings between the different worlds thrive installations and video works, exhibitions and event concepts, interdisciplinary communication and interaction ... honored with many awards, represented in public and private collections and published in numerous magazines, journals, catalogs, books. "The future of design lies in thinking about what is possible and not in the execution of the feasible." Reflecting, looking ahead, looking back. For Annett Zinsmeister only "unconventional questions and task assignments allow unconventional approaches and solutions." What may emerge if you let your mind run free, Zinsmeister will show in her presentation. The results are beyond all the usual categories, the perception is deliberately outsmarted... irritating as inspirational, aesthetically and ethically, active and forward-looking. A balancing act with unexpected views and perspectives. ">> article in german

The 1st League. These five individuals have set new standards in Stuttgart. in: ELLE City, Edition 12/2012, p.49: ART - ANNETT ZINSMEISTER "Her installations are a daring game with the fractures: space and architecture detached from their original contexts and added new dynamic processes together Annett Zinsmeister, 45, questions in her work habits of seeing, the mutability of spaces. And all this in Stuttgart? "The city has an easy manageable center, with a high cultural density. The art museums, galleries and contemporary music and dance performances have influenced me in my youth,"says Zinsmeister who beside her internationally recognized career as a freelance artist is taught there since 2007 at the Academy of Art. And because Stuttgart loves its master of decoding, offers her in her hometown always new faces for transformation."

Annett Zinsmeisters system view on Plattenbau by Rudolf Paul Gorbach in: TGM Typographic Society Munich Blog / night criticism, 28/01/2013: "The artist Annett Zinsmeister describes her work related to the topic"imposition with change."And that seemed not only being a compliment to the annual theme of the annual topic of events by tgm she also showed that is so. ... Space as a topic in cities she observed, for example, in the transformation of Berlin since 1989. Does changes mean an exemption or is it more a painful experience? Proximity and distance become closer in society, privacy is decreasing. In this case, what does identity mean, where do we find it, and what meanding does have architecture in this process? Her attempt to bring architecture, art and science together is an outstanding characterization of her work as an artist. And according to Nietzsche she assume that “the writer's inkhorn is part of the thinking process”.

Quo vadis EU? By Konstanze Kriese in: June calendar sheet 2012 Ed. Helmut Scholz, MEP: "Where are the secure ways can we go and how fast can we move through the City if we need to get food or water and know that we could be shot arbitrary by a Sniper at any time and place...?" asked Annett Zinsmeister through her search of clues in a diary during her trip to Sarajevo in 1996. Her pictures and notes are documents of desolation, the prosecution and the survival strategies of the civilian population. ... Annett Zinsmeister documents the change of use of buildings during the siege of Sarajevo. The survival assurance happened invisible and in fast movements. The labyrinthine old town offered better protection against violence as the clear sight lines to the new development areas. In the three war winters urban trees have been used up. The deforestation in turn decimated a sort of visual protection from the snipers. Massacre during the burials were not uncommon. Cemeteries were not places of rest, nor of farewell during the war. The recovery of nature in the urban area, a hortatory debris Park, as the artist and architect suggested it, is the most immediate Monument Against War in the city. Judging by today Sarajevo the margins of the remaining houses can not be overlooked.”

Not only architects are working on the grid by Dagmar Master Klaiber in: Bauwelt 22:12, June 2012: "The grid provides structure, context, structure and method, it maps grouped and forwards, is regular, expandable and highly efficient, but can also lead to stress-free structure, for constricting corset, so be a fetter that keeps the creative freedom in check – as far as one dares no escape from the system [...] At the end of the exhibition course you end up at the architecture, where the ambiguous structure of different structures is recognized: the Bauhaus architecture in the photos of Günter Förg, over the Plattenbau as wallpaper pattern by Annett Zinsmeister to the anonymous Temple of power in the paintings by Sarah Morris."

My friend, the Grid by Nikolai B. Forstbauer in: Stuttgarter Nachrichten, 5.5.2012, p.20: "Especially in Stuttgart one knows about the dragnet investigation. And so arouse already the title of the new special exhibition at the Kunstmuseum Stuttgart memories of a time of public distrust in the late 1970's. [...] Who now is thinking with the artists Roehr, Morellet, Mohr, Schoonhoven or Astrid Schindler of the Stuttgart gallery Müller-Roth, with names like Frank Badur of Galerie Michael Sturm or with Annett Zinsmeister of the gallery 14-1, feels the intensity of the special exhibition topic related to this city. [.. .] Nothing works here as if the weakness of a only few stops giving interior architecture should be attenuated by Art. Consequently placed is the lock by Eva Grubinger at the narrowest passage in the basement. A labyrinth that we traverse happily to see the photo works of Günter Förg to come to an architecture-about-architecture dialog by Annett Zinsmeister. Who uses the lift between the ground floor and basement, passes through a GDR-Plattenbau installation, once white hope to become master of the grid of the housing shortage in former socialist Germany. [...] It is not the title alone, that the rush already at the opening of the "dragnet" show at the Kunstmuseum Stuttgart was enormous on Friday evening: The exhibition is definitely highly recommended.”

Architecture and Photography by Florian Henrich in: Rundbrief Fotografie, Vol.19 (2012), No.1, p.41 ff: "An insight in the practice of an artist investigation der with architecture offered artist and architect Annett Zinsmeister (Berlin) wih the presentation of her work. Zinsmeister, interested in the perceptual constituion of space pointed out, that photography for her is a medium of visual investigation and the artistic (Re-)production of space and architecture. Consequently she understands her art practice as an investigative tool, that can be motivated by a need of appropriation and of documentation. Therefor she develops for example digital modules fromphotographs of different facades,and covers with them the surfaces of existing viruteller and virtual interiors. Reproduced as 2 D picture, these spaces then appear as images of real spaces.">> article in german

Freude schöner Götterfunken by Konstanze Kriese in: March Kalenderblatt 2012 Ed. Helmut Scholz, MEP "This war shows us the vulnerability of cultural diversity and our unwillingness or our inability to protect this diversity." Annett Zinsmeister wrote in 1997 in her travel diary about Sarajevo. During the war, the dead were separated in the cemeteries no longer according to religions and beliefs. In Sarajevo, the Jerusalem of the North, have been living for more than five hundred years Muslims, Jews and Christians, proclaim mosques, synagogues and churches from the multi-religious and multicultural city expansion along the river. . "The attackers aimed their attack strategies to the destruction of the cultural diversity of the multiethnic state of Bosnia-Herzegovina. This war was a war on the civilian population and a war with the city, stated the Serbian architect and writer Bogdan Bogdanovich. Cultural institutions were deliberately destroyed; Mosques and churches, cultural centers and sports facilities, schools, universities ... " >> article in german

Figure of motion by Annett Zinsmeister in: Barnes + Noble, Review: "From the twitch of a finger to the expansion of the universe, motion informs and shapes every facet of our world and culture. Figure of Motion is itself a dynamic publication, shifting easily from renaissance philosophy to modern media across ten essays and interviews, as it investigates how motion is observed, depicted and designed in art, architecture, design, dance, technology and everyday life. This collection addresses a range of topics, from the "physical intelligence" of athletic bodies to the choreographies of car design and surveillance cameras; the ways movement protects buildings and dematerializes landscapes; and what it takes to move ourselves emotionally or move us to act. More than a historical survey, Figure of Motion is ultimately about change and the accelerating directions in which our world's flows of money, goods and knowledge are currently taking us."

From fantastic, impossible and lost space - (In) visible Cities by Brigitte Schultz in: Bauwelt 42.11, October 2011: "Annett Zinsmeister, however works very directly with photographic images of real facades; stripped into parts (eg the single panel a prefabricated building) and put together to new collages. Japanese glass blocks or Berlin facade elements made of concrete are composed as container spaces that, in LED light frame installed, are distinguished for their technically perfect illusion. Especially for the exhibition has Zinsmeister also created a video installation, in which ideal city-plans from 2000 years history lift the theme "invisible city" again to another mental level ... " >> article in german

Staging the (In)visible City by Günter Baumann in: SUR Issue 18 October / November 2011 p.58: "The Wolfgang Hartmann Price [...] 2011 goes to Simone Kraft for her exhibition project "(In) Visible Cities": With only four protagonists the curator manages to throw a diverse multi-media all-round view on the -.. Visible and .. invisible - urban architecture. Also present: Annett Zinsmeister, since 2007 professor at the Art Academy in Stuttgart, Karl-Heinz Bogner, just been nominated as a lecturer up there, and Stefan Hoenerloh and John Twielemeier. Together they are strong, representing with different weights, photography, installation, painting, drawing, object art and ArchiSculpture. While experienced veterans work sore in alleged knowing pose of boundless world art, the 1980-born, living in Heidelberg expert is limited to certain clear positions which all point beyond themselves.
The city is a mirror of our time - a mixture of cultural, social, economic, ecological spheres, as a utopian idea built as everyday place with its own history and diverse symbols. For Annett Zinsmeister the imaginary space is at the center, she combines fictional art, practical architecture and reflected science together in installative photographs. The architect Karl-Heinz Bogner creates chiffre way-structural objects, prescribed a highly concentrated minimalism. John Twielemeier feel with the camera traces left of buildings after, Stefan Hoenerlohs fascinating paintings of deserted streets, squares and streets remind us of the imaginative brilliance of the architecture of the image."

Constructed worlds - (In) visible Cities Kunstverein Wilhelmshöhe Ettlingen by Michael Hübl in: Baden News 26.10.2011: "... With photography works also Annett Zinsmeister. She uses architectural structures and patterns that she reproduced so far that they aesthetically reache the vicinity of areas of early computer games. In the quite remarkable Ettlinger exhibition also yield a reference to the images of Stefan Hoenerloh. The painter shows virtual cityscapes that he transformed into information batteries by covering them with scriptur. And isn´t every town - like Calvino - a tale?"

Honest confrontation with the environment Susanne Marschall, Esslinger Zeitung, 4.10.2011, p.14: "Velvety they lay down on the floor nestle gracefully to the small hills and valleys of the rectangular expanse of sand. The with light modeled patterns paint much-pointed stars in the fine-grained surface, abstract shapes, tightly gridded circles or sparingly divided rectangles you act sensual in. They appear sensual in their fluffy soft objectivity and remind us of filigree crochets or designs for exceptional jewels. An embellishment or symbolic ornaments, like those found on ancient objects or structures. In reality the blurred projections by Annett Zinsmeister at Ettlinger Kunstverein are city maps. Thrown in a loop on the sandy landscape, they showcase radial, square and mixed designs from around 2,000 years of cultural history. Ideals, real built like Freudenstadt, a grid on which many American cities are based, and models from the utopian literature. The work by Zinsmeister is part of the exhibition "(In) visible Cities" curated by Wolfgang Hartmann winner Simone Kraft, which was opened on Friday in Ettlingen at Kunstverein Wilhelmshöhe .... ">>Aarticle in German

Annett Zinsmeister - Room I: No place. Nowhere? in: Artworld, Portal Art History, 15.6.2011: "The specific, the special and the identity of spaces, places and cities - whether at first glance still so inhospitable or unspecific - are the ones that Annett Zinsmeister is investigating in her work. It always revolves around architecture, the questioning of perceptual limits and the exploration of concepts of spatial formation and presentation techniques. Current and historical developments in the perception and design of space, also in the context of the new technologies, are discussed, and the habits of perception are challenged. Her interest is primarily in the urban problem zones and peripheral areas, conflict-prone places that for the artist represent transitional places; Places that have a special past and an uncertain future. Such a place represents the Plattenbau and in several series Zinsmeister discussed the phenomenon of the architecture of the prefabricated building. " >> Article in German

Theater without Vanishing Point. The Legacy of Adolphe Appia: Scenography and Choreography in the contemporary theatre Gabriele Brandstetter/Birgit Wiens (Ed.) Reviewed by Sabine Sörgel in: [rezens.tfm] e-journal for scientific reviews Institute for Theater, Film and Media Science at the University of Vienna , 15.6.2011: "Annett Zinsmeister even speaks of the legacy of scenic modularization as an" aesthetic program "which guarantees" uniformity in difference and repeatability in diversity "(p.76), thus pointing to the paradigm shift of contemporary choreography In the workings of Merce Cunningham and William Forsythe >> Article in German

Update!: 90 Years of the Bauhaus: What Now by Annett Zinsmeister in: rated with 4 stars (of 5) in goodreads, 2011: "Update!" invites a range of essayists to reflect on the continued relevance of the Bauhaus 90 years after its founding in 1919. Despite its brief existence and revolving directorship, the Bauhaus remains one of the preeminent teaching models for the promotion of avant-garde art, in its uniting of artists, architects and designers in an extraordinary conversation on the role of art in modern life. The site of experiments in the visual arts--ranging from architecture, industrial design, graphic design and furniture production to photography, textiles, ceramics, theater design, painting and sculpture--the legacy of the Bauhaus has profoundly shaped our understanding of the world today. Here, Gerd de Bruyn, Jeannine Fiedler, Sokratis Georgiadis, Kai-Uwe Hemken, Hans Dieter Huber, Nils Emde/niko.31, Philip Ursprung, Karin Wilhelm and Annett Zinsmeister provide a variety of takes on its aesthetic and pedagogical legacy.(less) >> article

Update! 90 years ofBauhaus – and now? by Jeannette Kunsmann in: baunetzwoche # 214, March 2011, S.4: "... Annett Zinsmeister Artist, architect, author, professor at the ABK Stuttgart and director of the Weißenhof Institute - in the context of the bauhaus jubilee in 2009, will not only discuss the actuality and updating of the bauhaus model; The Bauhaus has always been an experiment: Annett Zinsmeister, Jeannette Fiedler, Sokratis Georgiadis, Kai-Uwe Hemken , Hans Dieter Huber, Nils Emde, Philip Ursprung, Karin Wilhelm and Gerd de Bruyn are trying to approach this topic from different directions .... " >> Article in German

Libri: Le Ultime Uscite in Italia e nel Mondo: 56 titoli per 44 editori by Michela Rosso in: IL GIORNALE DELL’ARCHITETTURA, N. 91,febraio 2011, p.27: "Update! 90 years of Bauhaus. What now?, prefazione di Annett Zinsmeister, in inglese e tedesco.A discapito della breve durata della sua esistenza il Bauhaus ha fatto sentire la propria influenza in tutto il globo. E ancora oggi, dopo più di 90 anni, è possibile individuarne con chiarezza l’approccio in molti modelli didattici. L’espressione update del titolo va letta come investigazione, secondo quanto afferma Gerd de Bruyn nel suo saggio, per discernere quel che è storia e quello che invece è ancora di rilevanza per noi oggi." >> Artikel

Bauhaus tomorrow by Juergen Tietz in: NZZ Neue Zürcher Zeitung, 18.1.2011: "The Bauhaus has long since become a myth, but how does it continue today?". The study "Update! 90 years of Bauhaus - and now?", has emerged from a symposium at the State Academy of Fine Arts in Stuttgart. The editor, Annett Zinsmeister, introduces the history and effect of the school of art founded in Weimar in 1919, which, despite its short existence, quickly gained international character and influence. Karin Wilhelm shows the European-American interactions of this influence - from American Fordism and its architectural translation in Europe through the Bauhaus to the successful Bauhaus export to America, from where certain Bauhaus ideas after the Second World War on the American Way of Life »came back to Europe. The resulting differences in reception history of the Bauhaus-Modernism in the US and in Europe is also reflected in Philip Ursprungs contribution devoted to Gordon Matta-Clark, Tom Wolfe and Jeff Wall- three Bauhaus critics. Clearly demonstrates Nils Emde Photo Essay splendor and misery of the Bauhaus on the example of the settlement in Dessau Törten where the traces overlay the former Bauhaus aesthetics. The training ideals of the Bauhaus but also act to this day as its holistic design approach in the digital age of new media ultimately "in pictorial form on each user" we meet." >> Article NZZ online in German

Architecture cannot and should not be discussed solely as built space. Interview with Annett Zinsmeister by Simone Kraft in: www.architekturzeitung.eu, 9.1.2011: "It is the interweaving of art, architecture, and science that distinguishes Annett Zinsmeister's work. As a boundary-crosser of disciplines, she masterfully combines her work as an artist and architect, as a designer and cultural and media scholar. As a professor of design and experimental design, she has taught at the State Academy of Fine Arts Stuttgart since 2007, and since 2009 she has also headed the Weissenhof Institute. In addition, she works on artistic projects in her Berlin studio and is represented in numerous publications as well as in theory, her interest always revolving around architecture. It is the questioning of the limits of perception, the exploration of concepts of spatial formation and representational techniques that Zinsmeister addresses. War-torn sites in Sarajevo or construction ruins—these are what pique her interest. In them, she senses the multifaceted nature of urban and spatial structures." on an architectural, artistic, and theoretical level, and attempts to make their significance for social and political developments legible...." >> Interview in German

Theater Without a Vanishing Point: The Legacy of Adolphe Appia (ed.) G. Brandstetter/B. Wiens. Review by Sabine Sörgel in: RezensTFM Univ. Vienna (01/2011): "Building on this theme, Annett Zinsmeister even speaks of the legacy of scenic modularization as an 'aesthetic program' that 'guarantees uniformity in difference and repeatability in diversity' (p. 76). She thus refers to the paradigm shift in contemporary choreography, for example, in the working methods of Merce Cunningham and William Forsythe" >> Article in German

outside in / virtual interior. Works by the artist Annett Zinsmeister in: urbanspacemag # 3 copy + paste, Dez. 2010, p.56-59: "Zinsmeister works with principles of repetition, both in terms of content and concept. She intervenes in serial urban structures and codes, rewriting them by dissecting urban spaces into visual elements, signs, and images, and reassembling them elsewhere: With 'outside_in,' Zinsmeister copies facade elements from prefabricated apartment blocks and other buildings and adapts them to new spatial contexts. [...] With her serial visual elements, Annett Zinsmeister creates virtual spaces that push the principle of repetition to its extreme and defy the categories of outside and inside, public and private. She works with digital tools and uses copying and pasting as a fundamental artistic strategy. Her spaces are constituted purely from the repetition of pictorial elements, which she sometimes disrupts, so that viewers are repeatedly tricked just when they think they have grasped the seemingly obvious strategy." to have recognized. These inverted, sometimes dystopian spaces create irritations in a variety of ways and invite a tightrope walk between the attractive aesthetics of minimalism and the off-putting monotony of seriality." >> Article in German

Stagnation is not a fact. Interview by Bernd Haasis in: Stuttgarter Nachrichten 6.12.2010, p.14: "Movement is human existence. An interdisciplinary symposium of the Weissenhof Institute at the State Academy of Fine Arts is dedicated this Tuesday to the topic: 'The Form of Movement' – historical developments and current trends. We spoke with the host, Annett Zinsmeister..." >> Interview in German

The question of Urban Identity. Annett Zinsmeister has been exhibiting in the premises of the Nürtingen Art Association since Thursday by Heinz Böhler, in: Nürtinger Zeitung, p.1 13.11.2010: "A well-attended opening reception was held on Thursday evening at the Nürtingen Art Association. The exhibition features Berlin-based artist Annett Zinsmeister's photographically distorted (domestic) worlds in Sarajevo, Berlin, and elsewhere, always "In Search of Identity," as the title of the exhibition suggests. It will be on display until December 12th on the first floor of the former Oelkrug factory building. The Stuttgart-based artist and philosopher Harry Walter and Zinsmeister herself provided an engaging and charming, yet insightful and knowledgeable introduction...." >> Article in German

Toward a Ludic Architecture. The Space of Play and Games by Steffen P. Walz in:Carnegie Mellon University / ETC Press Entertainment Technology Center, 2010: "Zinsmeister (2004:78f.) traces the way that Utopia not only directly inspired Renaissance literature and design, but how the urbanistic designs depicted in the book also anticipate the ideal of the modular, gridded, controllable city, which, in combination with Leonardo da Vinci’s Homo Vitruvianus, still informs an architectural politics of total functionalism and measuring." >> article

Listening instead of seeing: An audio tour through Berlin by Simone Kraft in www.deconarch.com, 12/2009: "On December 4th, the new exhibition "Zeigen. Eine Audiotour durch Berlin" (Showing. An audio tour through Berlin) by Karin Sander, featuring contributions from more than 400 artists living and working in Berlin, opens at the Temporary Art Hall Berlin; ... Also on display – or rather, on display – is the work "virtual interiors" by Annett Zinsmeister, a Berlin-based artist who explores the intersection of architecture and art, and whose work will be presented in more detail by deconarch."

Urban hacking - paraflows 09 by Jana Wisniewski in: e-motion Artspace Internetkunstzeitschrift http://e-motion-artspace.info/hacking.htm 09/2009: "URBAN HACKING paraflows 09: "This time it is positioned at Karlsplatz as a container settlement [...] Annett Zinsmeister goes beyond the subversive, she collected facade elements from prefabricated buildings and composed a new space with them, what was outside is now inside..."

Annett Zinsmeister, by Pieter Van den Dorpe in PYTR75, DONDERDAG 5 MAART 2009

Junk Jet 2, by Greg J. Smith in: Serial Consign. Digital Culture & Information, 2009-01-13

"I remember hearing about the first issue of Junk Jet last year but the magazine slipped my mind until a recent post on Rhizome by Ceci Moss. Junk Jet, a self described "Fanzine for Electronics and Aesthetics" dedicated their second issue to exploring the theme of speculative architecture. Editors Asli Serbest and Mona Mahall frame "the speculative" as a pervasive presence that haunts all systems of production, threatens them with the destruction of their order and with collapse. This wild-eyed (perhaps even delirious) introduction frames a sprawling body of work by contributors which include Carsten Nicolai, Olia Lialina, Palace, JODI & Debel, Roomservices, a great interview with Annett Zinsmeister and many others...."

Architecture as spatial irritation by Michael Isenberg in: Stuttgarter Nachrichten, Kulturmagazin vol.140, 18.6.2008, p.17: "Annett Zinsmeister was born in Stuttgart in 1967. She studied art and architecture at the Berlin University of the Arts and, since the winter semester of 2007/08, has been a professor of design fundamentals/experimental design at the Weissenhof Academy of Art. She supervises students in the first phase (Bachelor of Arts) of the Architecture and Industrial Design program, as well as architecture students in the Experimental Design/Master of Arts program. The Academy notes: "This combination makes this professorship unique and reflects the distinctive nature of teaching at the Academy." Zinsmeister will introduce herself to the public next Tuesday, June 24th, at 7 p.m. In her official inaugural lecture, she will offer insights into the interplay of ideas that shape her work. Specifically: "In her artistic projects, she works with transformations and spatial disruptions, while also being familiar with built reality as an architect. In numerous publications, lectures, and courses, Zinsmeister addresses, among other things, cultural and media-technological influences on architecture, design, and art. She recently edited the volume "welt[stadt]raum.mediale inszenierungen" (world[city]space.media stagings) for transcript Verlag Bielefeld. Before her appointment at the Stuttgart State Academy of Art and Design, Annett Zinsmeister taught as a visiting and substitute professor at the Berlin-Weissensee School of Art and at the University of Wuppertal."

Then the line entered the room by Stefan Heidenreich: "The term "space" in this volume is to be understood more metaphorically. Alongside topics such as "Drawn Space," "Drawing in Space," "Spaces of Thought," or "Fashion" (as spatial drawing), there are all sorts of essays that have much to do with drawing and less with space. One of the few negative points—because overall it is an excellent book [...] In detail, many of the contributions are excellent. Only the most noteworthy ones will be presented below [...] In a leap of five hundred years, Annett Zinsmeister compares Leon Battista Alberti's project to measure and represent data on the architecture of Rome with analog and digital practices of the 20th century..." >> Article in German

Window, wall, window. Unusual views in Digital Art Museum, by Tom Mustroph in: Neues Deutschland, 4.1.2008, p.17: "Prefabricated apartment blocks can be appealing, especially when their regular external grid is turned inside out and transformed into a room. Berlin-based artist Annett Zinsmeister, who teaches in Stuttgart, did just that. She used views of the facades of 1970s-era buildings—facing nothing but windows and walls, windows and walls, and more windows and walls—as wallpaper covering the floor, ceiling, and walls. The front wall has been removed, allowing the viewer a glimpse into the room. Gray openings have been left in the back wall. These could be windows or doors. The vibrant dynamism of these facade surfaces is striking at first glance. The eye constantly shifts its focus, sometimes concentrating on the darker windows, then again on the wall elements. Upon closer inspection, one notices the nuances in the initially monotonous-looking surface. Curtains block the view behind some windows, flower boxes sit on the sills of others, and laundry hangs behind still others. Some windows, however, are empty. The houses are abandoned; the originally cool and artificial-looking facade has deteriorated into a squalid, dilapidated state. [...] The exhibition "Digital Space" in the small gallery on Tucholskystraße, which proudly calls itself the Digital Art Museum, raises awareness of how diverse and subtly intertwined digital spaces with reality can be."

Digital Space, exhibition at gallery [DAM] Berlin: http://www.germangalleries.com/ 11.2007: ".. Annett Zinsmeister uses sections of Plattenbau of the former GDR and builds new spaces by multiplying them. Outside turns into inside, doors are leading into emptiness. Architectural elements were used like ornaments to create new virtual spaces. The repetitiveness brings about a new structure. The final technique of large sized light boxes underlines the optical impression. In her art work Annett Zinsmeister is concerned with cultural influence of architecture. The principal of the series is her main emphasis. Through the endless repetition of segments she brings to light the fascination and the deterrent of mass architecture. Since 2007 Annett Zinsmeister is Professor for Creativity and Experimental Design at the Staatliche Akademie der Bildenden Kuenste Stuttgart. She lives in Berlin."

In search of an ideal urbanity in: Stuttgarter Zeitung / Kultur, April 2007: "From Stuttgart to Sarajevo, from São Paulo to Cape Town, in drawing and video, three-dimensional figures and installations, music, text, and a postcard collection: the Solitude Academy has likely never seen an exhibition as large and diverse as that of its last jury chairman, Fabrizio Gallanti. Including the opening night, with an animated film set in India, new music streamed via Bluetooth to mobile phones, and a staged performance in an elevator with a live broadcast to the ground floor, a total of thirty artists are represented with 24 works. ... And there is much to discover. Contrasts often lie close together: Krassimir Terziev, for example, presents a children's playground in Sofia that recreates the Cold War military arsenal using simple pipes. While Luciana Basauri and Dafne Berc explore tourism along the Croatian coast, Annett Zinsmeister depicts bombed-out Sarajevo and searches for shelters. The need for protection emerges as one of the overarching themes..."

Lost homes: Winfried Stürzl about the Installation urban shelter? by Annett Zinsmeister at Academy Schloss Solitude, 22.4.2007: "The work is formally excellent. Thanks to its presentation, the images speak for themselves. The two offset projections make optimal use of the space, and I particularly appreciate that the cross-fade projection with the negatives is positioned further in the background, while the Super 8 handheld camera film moves closer to the viewer. This creates a beautiful contrast, which is also continued in the black and white/color and silent/sound juxtaposition. Overall, this creates the effect of a "nervous eye" on the right half, taking in the sensory reality of destruction, the traces of modern warfare in Europe, with a mixture of shock and anticipation, and conveying it to the viewer with great authenticity thanks to the handheld camera. Meanwhile, the black and white negatives in the background speak calmly and—thanks to the distortion—almost archetypally of destruction, representing the cruelty of war in general. The reduction to mostly uninhabitable houses and burned-out cars, and the almost complete absence of people, lend the images a ghostly quality. The war was no longer raging when the photographs were taken, but it is precisely the absence of action that lends these images their silent horror. I also found it fascinating that the whirring of the camera evokes old vacation videos, yet the images themselves stand in stark contrast (especially in Mostar, a well-known tourist destination). Overall, the work is very good due to its consistent minimalism."

Annett Zinsmeister – [DAM] Digital Art Museum Interview in: eyemazing vol.3, 2006 p.178-183 >> download as pdf

Beauty and the beast. Exhibtions by German artist Annett Zinsmeister by Pernille Jensen in: MARK – Another Architecture vol.3, 2006 p.34-35: "Exhibitions by German artist Annett Zinsmeister transforms Plattenbau into a bewildering tightrope-walk between beauty and boredom...Realizing that her personal impressions opposed all the circulating Plattenbau clichés, Zinsmeister started digging deeper into the history and construction of the Plattenbau style. the more she learnt, the more convinced she became that Plattenbau shouldn´t be seen as ugly mass-architecture, but should be recognized as a multi-layered cultural phenomenon, which deserves respect, serious critic and precise analysis....having worked out the political reasons to why Plattenbau came to be seen as a reduced architecture of monotony, Zinsmeister was able to translate these investigations into spatial scenes in which cognitions could be experienced...."

Annett Zinsmeister: Virtual interiors by Winfried Stürzl in: Vorfahrt - international Art Project Katalog, Stuttgart 2006 p.102: "The spatial imagery and installations of Berlin-based artist Annett Zinsmeister are composed of focused elements of serial architecture, such as prefabricated apartment blocks. She constructs new virtual spaces from photographically documented fragments of architecture that is disappearing (or no longer exists). Alternatively, she clads existing interiors with virtual facades—wallpaper. The multiplication and recomposition of these serial architectural elements leads to a dynamic interplay of unexpected spatial compositions and perspectives. New perspectives, surreal spatial impressions, and spatial disorientations emerge, revealing diverse contrasts between inside and outside, between private and public."

Prefabricated housing as a crisis area by Peter Richter, Dissertation Hamburg 2006, p.123 f: "..Even more radical was the artist Annett Zinsmeister, who also released the computer game "Memodul. A Digital Memory Game about Prefabricated Housing and Other Modular Utopias" on CD-ROM in 2002. While players had already been able to appreciate the astonishing diversity of exterior wall panels, connecting elements, gable designs, and decorative forms through the "Prefabricated Housing Quartet" game, Zinsmeister's memory game presented them with the sheer variety of these supposedly uniform and monotonous facades, overwhelming their memory. The game didn't so much train memory as it did the very recognition of this diversity. What the memory game did even more effectively than the "Prefabricated Housing Quartet" was nothing less than deconstructing prefabricated housing and all the clichés, images, and judgments that had accumulated around it, inviting players to then reassemble it. Zinsmeister's prefabricated housing memory game originated from an exhibition at the Karl Ernst Osthaus Museum in Hagen, and the accompanying catalogue, "Prefabricated Housing or the Art of Waiting for Utopia in a Construction Kit," makes it even clearer that this is less about rehabilitating the aesthetics or the associated history of prefabricated housing than about reviving its principle: a rescue of prefabricated housing from within itself—and from within, before it had previously attracted the attention of artists. It presupposes that a large whole, if it has proven to be wrong or unfavorable, could be corrected from its individual parts. The emphasis on the utopian potential of modular systems, their fundamentally unlimited combinability and mutability, and the possibility of an almost playful approach by the imagination, leaves virtually no panel on top of another in the conventional image of socialist prefabricated housing, but rather directs the gaze back to its architectural-historical foundations, all the way to Gropius's construction kit. In computer terms, to stay within the digital context of games, one would speak of a restart: a proven and radical means of extricating oneself from a deadlock, from a state of being unable to maneuver. And the situation of prefabricated housing today could be described in a similar way. The possibility, suggested here, of reintegrating prefabricated housing into Western architectural history, as well as the pragmatic alignment of its additive (and thus potentially also subtractive) structure with the complex situation of urban shrinkage, not only describe the perspectives from which the issue of large-scale housing developments in East Germany is frequently discussed today, for example by the Bauhaus Foundation in Dessau, which is already preparing its own building exhibition on urban redevelopment in Saxony-Anhalt for 2010 (IBA Urban Redevelopment) – but, as will be shown below, these perspectives have long since found practical and tangible equivalents in the Thuringian town of Leinefelde..."

Highlights of the month: Stuttgart in December 2005 by Günter Baumann in: www.PORTALKUNSTGESCHICHTE.de: "Annett Zinsmeister (born 1967) combines a triple profession in her work: firstly, as a trained architect, she is familiar with built reality; secondly, as a cultural and media scholar, she engages with an expanded concept of art; and lastly, she is enough of an artist to develop her own sovereign perspective. For example, she is fascinated by the prefabricated apartment blocks of the former GDR, which she reduces to toy models and reassembles in spatial-serial collages. She intertwines the architectural blunder and the fascination of an architectural monstrosity into fictional types of promise and standardization, using the monotony to support her minimalist-ornamental approach, which also means a consistently irritating and contradictory worldview that she articulates: "Maintenance of utopia in a construction kit." The exhibition is complemented by an installation at the Akademie Schloss Solitude (November 18 – December 18, 2005) – Zinsmeister is a scholarship recipient there this year as part of the »art, science & business« program«.

Norm and Norma in Paradise by Krystian Woznicki in: telepolis 02.10.2005 (Abstract): "Whether it's the layout of "Tala Island" or "The Palm"—island constructions in the tradition of Thomas More's "Utopia" inevitably come to mind, and with them, designs characterized by normativity. From the city's layout to clothing—everything was subject to uniform rules. This often-overlooked aspect of the ideal city, repeatedly reimagined since More, can be traced throughout the entire history of utopia, as Annett Zinsmeister demonstrates in the volume she edited. This is quite surprising, since one would rarely associate the utopian with anything reminiscent of totalitarian systems. But whether the project was a phalanstery or a city called Ikara, whether Arturo Soria y Mata designed the Linear City or an Italian, with Arcosanti, wanted to build an ideal city in the Arizona desert—they were always thoroughly standardized models, which can certainly be interpreted as critiques of existing norms. However, as counter-worlds, they must always also be understood as counter-norms. If the models and designs of a supposed counterculture remained bound to a conservative cultural stance, because many of these new concepts were less a rejection of prevailing structures than a reflection of their rigorous principles of order, then something similar must be said of the avant-garde of island tourism. "The Palm" and "Tala Island" promise a counter-world, but in reality, they represent the vanguard of societies that have elevated planning and control to their highest principles. This has only a limited connection to the ambition of pushing back the boundaries of the impossible: for if anything illusory has been realized here, it is the supposed impossibility of a perfectly artificial world in which Norm and Norma go about their business on predetermined paths and promenades, like two actors in a computer program ....>> Article in German

For reference and leisurely reading. Book review by Stefan Benaburger in: design report 5/2005, S.66: "Media art sees itself as a discipline at the intersection of science, economics, society, and art; it is simultaneously a new aesthetic and innovation research. A comprehensive compendium documents the current state of affairs and brings together essays from 50 top-class experts. Illuminating and diverse answers [...] can be found in the impressive volume "Digital Transformations" by Ulrike Reinhard and Monika Fleischmann, whose list of authors reads like a who's who of the German-speaking media art scene. Fifty distinguished authors, including Sabine Breitsameter, Dominik Landwehr, Joachim Sauter, Peter Weibel, and Annett Zinsmeister, contribute their perspectives, presenting digital transformations in their diverse roles and using concrete examples as a new aesthetic and innovation research..." >> Article in Germn

Digital Transformation by Verena Dauerer in: Die Welt 15.1.2005: "The anthology "Digital Transformations" is a substantial tome in its format, comprehensively uniting contributions on media art as an interface between art, science, and economics. Co-editor and media artist Monika Fleischmann [...] succeeded in bringing together the "who's who" of contemporary media art, computer art, and science, including Sabine Breitsameter, Monika Fleischmann, Dominik Landwehr, Joachim Sauter, Peter Weibel, and Annett Zinsmeister."

HyperKult II: On the Positioning of Analog and Digital Media, Review of Florian Spengler in: www.theaterforschung.de: „Annett Zinsmeister's contribution confirms the assumption that analog and digital are not merely properties of the computer. Rather, after its introduction, they can be used as analytical tools, in this case for forms of representation as communication. Zinsmeister demonstrates, using Leon Battista Alberti's method of creating maps with coordinate systems, Ernst Neufert's still influential architectural design theory, and the CAD programs derived from it, that analog and digital techniques only become fundamental modalities of architecture when they are mutually dependent representational methods.“

Agony on the internet. The first "Media Art Days" in Bad Ems by Georg Imdahl in: FAZ - Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung 4.6.2003 No.128 Feuilleton S.128 abstract: "...Annett Zinsmeister (Berlin) described an example using a popular computer game that is about to go online: the "Sims Community," a virtual city on the internet... As the speaker immersed herself in the game, she discovered in its highly rationalized, griddled world not only models that reach back to antiquity... She also saw the "kitsch dictates of the programmer" revealing themselves, as he subjected the avatars to his own taste. Zinsmeister argued that this game is a lesson, especially for artists, in how much existing software can predetermine and limit aesthetic possibilities. The "object library," as a repertoire of forms that can be easily accessed, is a seductive instrument of influence. Her conclusion, too, could have been formulated by Vilém Flusser: Don't succumb to the temptations of the possibilities, but rather "steal and alienate" the tools from their usual use".

Living in a prefabricated apartment building. Latest cries by Anja Dilk in: Berliner Morgenpost, 1.2.2005 abstract: "In the prefabricated housing blocks. Now that the GDR is approaching its 15th anniversary, the simple, boxy construction is attracting the next generation. It's hardly surprising that these blocks are becoming a focus of art... For those who find that too tedious, there's the folding panel for the theme of living in prefabricated housing blocks... The digital alternative is offered by Memodul: a virtual prefabricated housing memory game (www.ethicdesign.de)

Wallpaper change / Wallpaper "P2/11 white" by Annett Zinsmeister by Nicole Weißkirchen in: www.arcguide.de & arcguide-Magazin Title/Topic - 7th Edition 06/2003: "Certainly not your everyday work – after several years of exploring the theme of prefabricated housing, the next step in the project phase for art and architecture designer Annett Zinsmeister was to translate the prefabricated panel into wallpaper. The idea behind her design, themed "inside.out," is to play with the reversal of exterior and interior spaces. The wallpaper becomes a projection surface, exploring the perception of the everyday."

Annett Zinsmeister, ed. Plattenbau, oder: Die Kunst, Utopie im Baukasten zu warten by Gerd Bayer in: Utopian Studies, Vol. 14.1, 2003 p. 285-88 - Bookreview "In Zinsmeister’s work, this tension between architectural norms and aesthetic creativity is repeatedly, and playfully, resolved. The ludic character of her project is further emphasized by the fact that she willfully sidesteps physical limitations by creating some of her models in virtual space. Gravity, statics, and other “real” considerations do not limit her creative energy. Concrete becomes almost weightless and freed from a specific location, creating Zinsmeister’s own type of ou-topos. The illustrations of her art present themselves as graphic experimentations that aim to please visually. [...] Rather, by pointing out the creative potentialities of normed building, the contributors challenge practicing architects at least to aim at a more creative use of their basic units. Because of this implicit intention, the book is a truly utopian project, much more so than the actual housing projects of the GDR government—despite programmatic declarations to that effect—ever were.[...] As a whole, Zinsmeister’s edited volume makes a coherent argument, despite the differences in both style and tone as found in the various contributions. In her re-assessment of the rich potential of normed building, Zinsmeister successfully dissociates the engineering and physical side of building from the aesthetic and politico-socially committed power of architecture."

Day eight of the "City on the Shelf" super-construction project, WK8P2ABBAU: August 25, 2003. "Prefabricated Housing or the Art of Maintaining Utopia in a Modular System" is the title of a book by Annett Zinsmeister recommended by "City on the Shelf." According to Zinsmeister, prefabricated housing, as a supposedly built utopia, is based on a modular system whose limited combinations and reduction to a few types have led to the ossification of a variable system. However, untapped possibilities lie dormant within this modularity. Artists and scientists are exploring them."

Annett Zinsmeister Plattenbau oder Die Kunst, Utopie im Baukasten zu warten / MEMODUL by Ina Christin Männle in: Beton - und Stahlbetonbau Heft 8 98.volume S.A 34 August 2003: "The book 'Plattenbau oder Die Kunst, Utopie im Baukasten zu warten' (Prefabricated Housing or The Art of Waiting for Utopia in a Kit) is a collection of scholarly articles on architectural promises, standardization, typification, and modularity....Annett Zinsmeister explores...the built visionary state dream of the GDR, the prefabricated housing system, and its schematic design. The author dismantles the standardized prefabricated housing series and uses the resulting modules as a play model. She experiments with the building blocks, exploring utopian and possible design combinations without considering function or economic viability. She places the 'prefabricated housing' in an artistic context, transforming assembly systems into spatial collages. Annett Zinsmeister and the authors offer readers a fresh perspective on the "architectural eyesore" of prefabricated housing. The full-page detail photographs of existing Berlin buildings and their perspective facade shots hint at the artistic possibilities of these modular units. Zinsmeister's photographs of her free compositions within a prefabricated housing complex demonstrate the hidden design potential. A small book with a broad scope, which doesn't simply lament the apparent monotony of prefabricated housing, but rather explains the historical and scientific context of its creation."

A brief reminder of the utopia of the concrete panel by Andreas Denk in: Der Architekt Ausgabe 3-4 April 2003 S.8 (abstract): "The prefabricated panel wasn't quite so simple after all. A digital memory game developed by Berlin artist Annett Zinsmeister demonstrates the range of possibilities that could be achieved over time with the different types of prefabricated panels. But the meaning of the Memodul CD lies deeper. In an exhibition project at the Karl-Ernst-Osthaus Museum in Hagen, Zinsmeister explored the social vision of the prefabricated panel and other "modular utopias" of the 19th and 20th centuries. Therefore, the CD contains not only a memory game about Berlin's prefabricated housing, but also one featuring utopian designs such as Future Systems' "Peanut Project," Walter Jonas's "Intrapolis," Bruno Taut's "Alpine Architecture," and Tony Garnier's "Cité Industrietrielle." The carefully programmed memory games play with the emergence and disappearance of the prefabricated panel and its related utopian models: ultimately, it is only our capacity for memory that determines the longevity of the utopia...."

Plattenbau oder Die Kunst, Utopie im Baukasten zu warten Book recommendationin: www.archforum.ch 03/2003: "One of the few books on the development of prefabricated housing. Includes numerous color photographs and texts on the typology and structure of these housing estates."

In a storm of functionality. Between the Trabant and the pedestrian crossing signal: national cultural heritage prefabricated housing by Andreas Seidel in: Scheinschlag - Berliner Stadtzeitung - Volume 03/2003 abstract: "...The card game "Berlin Concrete Products" explores the design aesthetics of the concrete slab when detached from its original context. Annett Zinsmeister's digital memory game "Memodul" lends itself to contemplating the question of the balance between form and function. It offers 1001 modular possibilities for transforming the WBS 70 into imaginative deconstructions.... Such unconventional experiments, which rely on alienation strategies and transcend traditional representational techniques, are not only symptomatic of the way prefabricated housing is treated, but also point to a new approach to facets of GDR culture as a whole. The flexible arrangement of its remnants and stored memories unfolds in the new context into unusual and unsettling reorganizations. Many a surprising insight lies hidden within this playful approach. From the multitude of possible layers of meaning emanates an aroma that unsettles our perception of these housing estates, which are usually seen as counter-worlds to civilization. Besides the immense social significance of these prefabricated housing estates, it is their cultural density that will make it difficult for the guardians of German dominant culture to fight against their unstoppable ascent into the pantheon of—whether they like it or not—now all-German national cultural heritage. Until then, however, they certainly serve as a quarry for their rehabilitation."

Plattenbau on the screen. Annett Zinsmeister: Memodul by Axel John Wieder in: www.fluter.de Dez.2002/ Jan.2003 abstract: "In a project for the Karl Ernst Osthaus Museum in Hagen, Annett Zinsmeister developed a computer-based memory game that even deals with spatial concepts. She observed that since the end of the GDR, prefabricated apartment blocks have been viewed with suspicion as a distinct building type and are thus gradually being forgotten. If the buildings aren't demolished, at least their facades, their standardized appearance, disappear behind plaster and a fresh coat of paint...

With the possibilities of variation and combination, planners attempted to develop more open systems of industrial mass housing. The diverse facade designs of East German prefabricated apartment buildings also resulted from such discussions, and Annett Zinsmeister places great emphasis on these aspects. The images in her memory game depict details of prefabricated buildings, revealing a tension between uniformity and design, standardization and playfulness. Grids, balconies, and concrete elements break up the strict grid of the panels, and even their varied joints have a decorative effect. From a distance, this aesthetic quality becomes appealing once agani.

In a second set of memory cards, Annett Zinsmeister explores the history of modularization and the utopian possibilities of standardized construction. From the Tower of Babel to designs by the American utopian Buckminster Fuller or the futuristic New York from Luc Besson's film "The Fifth Element," small images appear on the monitor, revealing their origins in an information panel. Zinsmeister describes her work as "maintenance of utopia in a construction kit"—a kind of game-theoretical reflection on "cultural memory." The grid motif allows the layers of meaning surrounding standardized buildings and the structure of memory to intersect with media theory and architectural history. In other words, it is meaningful."

The wonderful world of utopia in: Architecture & Construction Forum, Austrian specialist journal for building culture, issue [number] 02/Jan 03, 31.1.2003 p.6, abstract: "This digital memory game plays with the spontaneous recognition of utopias and those that aspired to be utopias. ...A game for anyone interested in architecture and cultural studies."

Plattenbau oder Die Kunst, Utopien im Baukasten zu warten, Ed. Annett Zinsmeister recommendation in: www.kunstundbuecher.at , Jan. 2003: "This publication was produced in conjunction with the exhibition "museutopia – Steps into Other Worlds" at the Karl Ernst Osthaus Museum. Editor Annett Zinsmeister has been working on the topic of prefabricated housing since 1996 and brings together a diverse range of authors and perspectives in this publication: Wolfgang Pircher/Christa Kamleithner, Walter Prigge, Gerd de Bruyn, Michael Thompson, Anne Hoormann, Wolfgang Ernst, Ludwig Wittgenstein, Kai-Uwe Hemken, Claus Pias, Roland Barthes, Eckhard Siepmann, and Michael Fehr – from the individual element of the prefabricated panel (Wittgenstein) to the history and utopias of prefabricated housing (Zinsmeister) to a media studies perspective on "panels and tiles.(Pias)."

Plattenbau oder Die Kunst, Utopien im Baukasten zu warten, Ed. Annett Zinsmeister book recommendation: ARCH+ 162 Okt. 2002

Memodul: a digitak Memory recommendation 11/2002 in: Federal Agency for Civic Education www.bpb.de/presse: "Incredibly easy to play on any computer..." 

Review tp Annett Zinsmeister: MEMODUL - Ein digitales Memory zu Plattenbauten und anderen modularen Utopien by Bernhard Thilo Kroeschell in: www.PORTALKUNSTGESCHICHTE.de abstract: "Annett Zinsmeister's CD invites a playful exploration of utopias. It contains two memory games: one consisting of images of utopian designs from the Renaissance to the present day, the other showing pictures of existing prefabricated apartment blocks from the GDR. In these two memory games, the representation of architectural utopia in images and plans has opposing effects: the visualizations of the unbuilt utopian designs in one game make their realization imaginable; here, the image becomes a threat of the utopia's realization and its inevitable failure. In the prefabricated apartment block game, however, the realized design is precisely what the image, its modular arrangement, and random recombination conjure. The language of the blocks is augmented by visual means such as scale and perspective, revealing new connections and thus making them conceivable. The abstraction of the image brings the built reality back to the level of thought. In the memory game, seeing and recognizing the utopia is a prerequisite for subsequently making it disappear with a mouse click. Annett Zinsmeister's charmingly playful approach to utopias, in addition to the associated critical examination, is simply fun."

Plattenbau by Mercedes Bunz in: DE:BUG 66, December 2002, S.46 abstract: "For the exhibition "Museutopia" at the Karl-Ernst-Osthaus Museum in Hagen, artist Annett Zinsmeister has essentially re-enacted the prefabricated housing block in a construction kit, a kind of video game, and published a catalog that brings together approaches from theory, architecture, art, and science in the form of various essays that intersect with the theme. "Prefabricated Housing Block or the Art of Utopia in a Construction Kit" is primarily concerned with the utopian element inherent in the combination of a structure. A good starting point for a small project."

Computergame Memodul in: BAUWELT, 6.December 2002 abstract: "The computer game Memodul, created as part of the exhibition "Museutopia – Steps into Other Worlds" at the Karl Ernst Osthaus Museum in Hagen, is now available on CD-ROM. This digital memory game about prefabricated apartment blocks and other modular utopias was designed by Berlin-based designer Annett Zinsmeister and is based on extensive photographic documentation of various prefabricated panel building types in their original state. The computer game Memodul is part of the art project "Prefabricated Housing or the Art of Maintaining Utopia in a Kit." A book of the same name—also recently published—brings together artistic and academic contributions on utopia, seriality, and prefabricated housing in 144 pages."

The place of utopias by Kay Heymer in: TEXTE ZUR KUNST, Heft 48 December 2002 abstract: "In the summer of 2002, the Karl Ernst Osthaus Museum in Hagen celebrated the "100th anniversary of the Folkwang idea" with an extremely ambitious, contradictory, and complex project. Accordingly, the artists participating in "Museutopia" cannot limit themselves to a conventional artistic role (by creating consumable, attractive objects), but must engage in their work with questions that lie outside the aesthetic ivory tower. For example, Annett Zinsmeister explores the potential of East German prefabricated apartment blocks. The "Museutopia" exhibition is an exuberant, less entertaining than challenging space for discourse, its boundaries in space and time arbitrarily defined."

Museutopia - Steps in other Worlds by Helga Meister in: KUNSTFORUM Volume 162, 2002, p. 341

Utopia in the construction kit in: BAUNETZ, 20.11.2002 abstract: "The digital memory game about prefabricated buildings and other modular utopias was designed by Berlin-based designer Annett Zinsmeister and is based on extensive photographic documentation of various prefabricated building types in their original state. These appear together with fragments of historical utopias arranged in a grid on a playing surface, thus forming a digital memory game..."

Playground for visions bycIra Mazzoni in: SÜDDEUTSCHE ZEITUNG, 11. July 2002, p.17 abstract: "Annett Zinsmeister's work, *The Utopian Plan, or the Art of Preserving Utopia in a Construction Kit*, is considerably more subtle. Zinsmeister explores the utopian potential of East German prefabricated housing and develops a game of unforeseen possibilities from the elements of a five-story WBS 70 unit. The moment the player departs from the square grid, which Thomas More already adopted as the layout of his ideal city, wondrously fantastical constructions can be created from the panels and tiles. Chaos is inherent in the system."

Museutopia by Ursula Baus in: db. deutsche bauzeitung 9/02, S.14 abstract: "Annett Zinsmeister has dedicated herself to prefabricated housing – with the aim of "creating utopia in a modular system." The WBS 70 series of prefabricated buildings – with load-bearing exterior walls – serves here as a structural object that can be disassembled and rearranged playfully and unconventionally. What the disassembled and reassembled series of panels is capable of achieving in concrete, individual ways is far less significant than the process itself, which is of paramount importance to the artist and architect. Naturally, one thinks of Constructivism and Deconstructivism, which converge in this project. However, the semi-realistic character of the project, with its imaginative ambition, makes it more interesting for architects than its connection to these "isms.."

Anniversary exhibition of constructive and positive approaches in: WESTFÄLISCHE RUNDSCHAU 11.6.2002 abstract: "The opening of the "Museutopia" exhibition at the Osthaus Museum, celebrating the 100th anniversary of the Folkwang Museum, was met with great enthusiasm. International artists from America, Great Britain, and Eastern Europe contributed to the exhibition, offering the KEOM (Cultural and Educational Museum) many surprises. A film production (Alice Creischer and Andreas Siekmann) was featured, as were sound installations. In a miniature kitchen (Judith Walgenbach), uncoordinated, rising yeast dough symbolized the unpredictability of the future, and game theorists found plenty to enjoy in the "Plattenbaumemory" (a type of memory game) (Annett Zinsmeister)...."

A wondrous transformation of the records. Scattered and bundled elements relating to the works of Annett Zinsmeister by Kai-Uwe Hemken in: Plattenbau oder die Kunst Utopie im Baukasten zu warten, Hagen 2002 abstract: "Annett Zinsmeister traces the evolution of architectural development, condensing her ideas into a new state of utopia. She creates utopian images that do not materialize but remain in a state of latency: The industrial building materials, whose forms speak of rational modernism, unexpectedly become artifacts of the utopian in their deconstructivist composition... Utopia and imagination are an inseparable pair of siblings, to which Zinsmeister's wondrous transformation of the concrete slab and its representation in architecture alludes."

"The photographic images [MEMODUL—a digital memory game about prefabricated buildings and other modular utopias] show fragments of prefabricated building facades, but in this arrangement in an unusual way. Zinsmeister's square photographs present lines and surfaces whose composition more or less suggests a building. The resulting shift in perception is a conflict between the autonomy of the forms and their functionalization in the service of representation."

Memodul. A Plattenbau by Wolfgang Ernst in: Memodul 2002 abstract: "Annett Zinsmeister's Memory, which playfully explores the disappearance of prefabricated concrete slabs as a visual feature of the urban landscape, is based on a photographic documentation of the original slab series and is presented as an art edition in a virtual, interactive environment. It focuses on the utopian potential of standardized construction—and its loss, deconstructing and reconstructing utopia. A possible recovery occurs through the medium of the archive of images, collective memory, and building plans. This gives rise to the concept of a digital memory that not only intransitively engages with the disappearance and remembrance of prefabricated concrete slabs and with utopian ideals through its imagery, but also transitively enacts the principle of prefabricated construction itself—as a form of image combination, a loose coupling (medium) that coalesces into a fixed form (thing)."

Folds - dynamic multiple Jury statement for the 1999 Ring Prize (excerpt): "The minimal use of materials contrasts with the multifaceted reception... Only in the interplay between intimacy, where the artwork is created, and community, where the diversity of the results becomes visible, does a dynamic and constitutive exchange emerge. The playful handling of the everyday material paper is convincingly paired with a scientific interest in processes of change and perception."

The country needs new kitchens. Interview with Deutschlandradio Berlin BERLIN, 1998

Wasch-oh-mat S 1009 in: ABOUT WASSER – Crossing the waters, Düren 1997

New ideas for Plattenbau by Kay Rosansky in: DBZ. Deutsche Bauzeitschrift 3/1997, p.116-117 abstract: "Award-winning competition entries by Annett Zinsmeister and Knut Hohenberg: (...) The desire to realize individuality in a small bathroom on a manageable budget led Annett Zinsmeister to her solution. The strictly modular design of the bathroom system allows for great versatility in its application. Annett Zinsmeister, at the time a student at the University of the Arts, aims to ensure that even in apartments from the 1960s and 70s, residents are afforded maximum individuality...The bathroom is furnished by its user according to their own taste, design preferences, and financial resources. Changes in needs and requirements can thus be accommodated with remarkable ease...The designer constantly kept the cost of such a wet room in mind during her design process. Given the large housing stock, which could act as a multiplier if the system were implemented, this approach is both sensible and necessary."

Unfoldings by Angelika Schnell in: Unfoldings, Exhibition Catalog, Berlin 1996. Excerpt: "Several sheets of paper, their surface moistened on one side, roll, curl, and unfold into astonishing complexity and ambiguity. The application of the simplest means generates complex, almost "organic" movements and "natural" forms. The crucial aspect of the unfolding experiment is the absence of technology. Because the individual folding processes cannot be reversed, the fascination lies in Annett Zinsmeister's depiction of movement, its transformability, its self-organization in its respective uniqueness and unpredictability – mathesis singularis."

New ideas for the "Platte" Reportage in: TROCKENBAU AKUSTIK 6/96, .65 abstract: "With a "technical column," Annett Zinsmeister solved the space problem in the WBS 70 prefabricated building type... Her professional design took into account the needs of the "traditional family" as well as the living styles of single households or shared apartments. By limiting the number of furnishings and using them multifunctionally, the award winner succeeded in gaining space while simultaneously catering to the individual tastes of the tenants."

New ideas for bathrooms and kitchens in prefabricated apartment blocs by Oliver Kempert in: BERLINER MORGENPOST 7.2.1996, S.31 abstract: "Annett Zinsmeister from the Berlin University of the Arts, one of the winners, solved the space problem of the WBS-70 kitchen with a modular "technical column"...The ingenious part: Since the other furniture can be easily moved, the kitchen can be transformed into, for example, a study in no time at all."

Jany Richard in: ELLE, City Spezial 1991