*Anja Schnaars
*Anja Schnaars studied graphic design with focus on animation and illustration at the Hochschule für Künste HfK Bremen, graduating in 2001, and has been working as a freelancer ever since. For several years, she worked mainly as an illustrator, animator, and sometimes graphic designer, and only pursued independent projects rather unnoticed. In 2007 she had a teaching assignment for animation at Burg Giebichenstein Kunsthochschule Halle. In 2015, she decided to focus on her free artistic work, founded the edition TOLLWURSTREGEN for publishing word-picture works, primarily in the form of artist‘s booklets; these have been labeled with numerous prizes. Since 2022, she is a member of the Künstlerinnenverband Bremen, GEDOK, and has participated in exhibitions in Germany, Switzerland, Italy, and Spain.
Her artistic practice is both content-wise and formally a working through of what is given. She prefers to use everyday, trivial materials and uses them as symbols of the prevailing normality that needs to be dismantled. Formally, she likes to set herself fixed conceptual frameworks within which she acts associatively and playfully in an experimental flow. She works serially, multi- and transmedially, always focusing on the interplay of text and image, of content and form, and of profound thoughts and humor.
Consistently applying the artistic principle of disassembly and transformation, she appears under various (partly anagrammatic) pseudonyms; all these artistic pseudonym personalities form a personal unionist collective that cultivates individual characteristics, exchange, and mutual inspiration and presents itself and all fitting in one on www.wahre-freude.de .
During her residency in the Arbeitszimmer she appears as Cara Janhanss* and Anna Schnaarz*.
Cara Janhanss* / Anna Schnaarz*
"LOSLEGEN, SIE KOSTENLOS – manifesting GenderGAGA"
(Translation of LOSLEGEN, SIE KOSTENLOS is difficult to impossible … because its real Gaga (it‘s a spam fragment). It could mean something like GET STARTET, SHE FREE or GO AHEAD, YOU LOT OF COSTS or SWING INTO ACTION, YOU CHARGE LOT or LOT LAYING, YOU LOT OF CHARGE or nothing at all.)
Assholes not being able to count to two (0 and 1 is complex enough in their eyes) are now marching to fight. For their freedom. For their very special color spectrum of rainbows ranging from light poop to dark poop. For the pig‘s slurry topping everything on their homeland‘s festive table and filling them with pride. For women too, somehow. Kind of. Well, all right. For right ones. Most of them have one at home themselves. This is really funny again, and so they laugh. Stop laughing. Start gazing again serious like their ties with bold patterns and important. Cause this is truely not a circus here…!
It‘s the year 2025. We are tired of these ties and suits and the men in them. We are sick of these miserable white men (cis!) with potency problems. We are sick of their attributions, their distortions, their victim-to-perpetrator inversions. Their delusions, their destructive rage, their mania for supremacy. Their inferiority complexes, their anxiety disorders, their complete incompetence across the board.
It‘s the year 2025. We are determined not to leave the playground to them (the playground is the world, right now collapsing); we declare Gendergagaism. Manifesting it in words and images is what we plan for our stay in the „Arbeitszimmer“. We collect waste from the omnipresent insanity – spam mails, pictures of VIP-assholes found on the Internet, pulp magazines (penny dreadfuls), advertising brochures, bible texts – and recapitulate all this gagaistically. We focus here on patriarchal and neoliberal structures with all their excesses and their entanglements and examine the potential of queerness as a resistant force against authoritarian conservatism and neo-fascism.
