upcoming and recent – Ann Messner

upcoming and recent (scroll down)

2026

blind me! LIGHT
Katharina Gruzei and Ann Messner
presented by the Monira Foundation at MANA Contemporary, Jersey City
October 19, 2025—May 29, 2026
blind me! LIGHT is accessible to the public 24/7 at the front entrance.

katharina gruzei and ann messner blind me! LIGHT 2023

link to full video blind me! LIGHT 2023 >

link to project webpage >

In 2023, Katharina Gruzei, in Vienna, and Ann Messner, in New York, collaborated on a project utilizing the pervasive surveillance of public space. From their respective distance 4000 miles, they mapped the locations of publicly accessible online surveillance cameras within their two respective cities. Choreographing each other’s movements through the live online surveillance view, they tracked one another through the city, each carrying a full-length mirror.

Passing camera to camera, they used the mirror as a device to refract the sun into the lens of the surveillance cam – blinding the recording of their passing in view of each camera. Back and forth, they recorded each other’s actions as one camera after another was struck by blinding light. At night, they switched the mirror for a handheld strobe. The resulting video blind me! LIGHT, presents the recorded evidence the two left behind – traces of their movements through their respective cities. The glitched recordings become spectral artifacts, resisting the public surveillance with rudimentary tools and momentarily blinding the surveillance gaze.

link to Monira Foundation exhibition page >

2025

In Our Time: Eleven Artists + W.E.B. DuBois
curated by Loretta Yarlow
Pratt Manhattan Gallery, New York
September 26—December 20, 2025

link to gallery website >

link to exhibition catalogue >

link to virtual tour of exhibition >
Excerpt from curator Loretta Yarlow’s text for the exhibition: “Now more than 60 years after the death of W.E.B. Du Bois, this exhibition turns to eleven leading artists to reflect on the legacy of one of the most profound and influential African American intellectuals of the 20th century and on the impact that Du Bois’ writings and ideas has had on their creative process. Artworks by Angel Abreu & Studio K.O.S., Derrick Adams, Radcliffe Bailey, LaToya Ruby Frazier; Theaster Gates, Julie Mehretu, Ann Messner, Jefferson Pinder, Mickalene Thomas and Carrie Mae Weems offer aesthetic contributions to the re-examination of Du Bois through today’s lens.”

ann messner detail of Du Bois_the FBI files 2012-3

This exhibition is a new iteration of the 2013 Du Bois in Our Time, curated by Loretta Yarlow, at The University Museum of Contemporary Art UMass Amherst

link to 2013 exhibition >

link to Ann Messner’s DuBois_the FBI files 2013 >

subway stories and other shorts 1978-9
film screening at Monira Foundation Cinema, MANA Contemporary, Jersey City
Sunday October 19, from 1-2pm and 4-5pm, this event is FREE to the public

frogman film still, digitized super 8, 1978

link to Monira Foundation Cinema @ 1pm >
link to Monira Foundation Cinema @ 4pm >

Detective Show X

curated by Robert Kaltenhäuser and Lene ter Haar

Moltkepark, Aachen, Germany

August 16-18, 2025

A group exhibition of urban interventions located collectively at undisclosed locations within the post industrial urban Moltkepark in Aachen, Germany from August 16-18, 2025. The inspiration for Detective Show X was the 1978 historical exhibit the Detective Show organized by US artist John Fekner in Gorman Park, Queens, New York.

A street sign for EXIT 23 is installed at the pedestrian entrance to the park, inviting the public to access, through a QR code, a live webcam stream of ongoing traffic conditions at EXIT 23. EXIT 23 is located, as posted on the sign, at an undisclosed location 6005 km away. In addition to the physical condition of distance are the visual clues within the livestream of the 6 hour time differential between the two locations: afternoon in Aachen is early morning at EXIT 23, as late night is early evening and early morning is late night.

exhibition info >

EXIT 23 sign at entrance to Moltkepark

livestream screen capture EXIT 23

link to EXIT 23 >

anonymous billboards at locations within the Essen Hauptbahnhof (central station), in conjunction with the public programing of City of Play, Essen (Germany). Curated by Margrit Meibach and Mathieu Tremblin, organized by TRANSURBAN/Come Together Projekt e.V., North Rhein-Westphalia Ministry of Culture, July 2025

ann messner, balloon (1978), Essen Hauptbahnhof, billboard located on ICE platform 2025

ann messner, balloon (1978), Essen Hauptbahnhof, two billboards located at entrance to subway station, 2025

“Pratiques Urbaines Sous Surveillance, Entretien Croisé Entre Ann Messner et Thomas Lasbouygues.” Revue Extérieure Fédération de l’Art Urbain, issue No zero, Paris, July 2025

link to magazine (in French, English translation pending) >

the atlases 2023-4
Open Book(s), The Monira Foundation and Mana Contemporary
Jersey City, NJ
February 22–July 1, 2025

atlas (extraction) detail

link to installation images >

link to the text ‘the atlases’ >

OFF WORLD – Urban Screenings

March 6–8 and 13–15, from 6:30 to 10 in the evening

Offenbach city center / Station Mitte (former Kaufhof), Germany

The exhibition, featuring international and national video art, takes place in public space and transforms Offenbach’s city center into a multimedia projection screen. Moving images on eleven facades, including the future station Mitte, connect with the cityscape. The projections combine utopia and dystopia and invite exploration: visitors experience their surroundings through movement in the city, as local and global visual worlds collide.

link to project website >

program screening 3—map and artists >

2024

subway stories and other shorts

film screening at METROGRAPH, Lower East Side, NYC

Sunday October 13 @ 2:45 link to purchase tickets>

link to text ‘reflections on an unsanctioned performative practice responsive to public space’ >

“subway stories and other shorts brings together the digitized Super 8 documentation of Ann Messner’s renowned guerilla performances from the 1970s, shot in the New York City subway system and other public thoroughfares. In the cramped container of the subway carriage Messner tested the pliability of the social contract and found ‘a universe of concentrated collective imagination, with untapped potential.’ The suite of durational films will be presented in the context of other work by the artist from the same period, much of which was shot in lower Manhattan, and has never been shown publicly before.”

Post-screening conversation with artist and filmmaker Ann Messner moderated by Melanie Kress, Senior Curator at the Public Art Fund.

Screening organized in collaboration with Davila-Villa & Stothart.

2023

Ann Messner und Katharina Gruzei: underground & uncommissioned

exhibition curated by Eginhartz Kanter

October 28 – November 11, 2023

Oxymoron Galerie, Wien

Eginhartz Kanter’s text (german): Blind Me! LIGHT >

installation images underground & uncommissioned >

‘slalom’ 1977-79 (super 8 digital transfer 2023) >

Open Book: Ann Messner

online project the Monira Foundation 2023

link to Open Book: body double (annotated atlas) >

2022

body politic in 5 acts an anonymous public project developed for the exhibition Right Time Right Place

‘body politic in 5 acts’ project description >

installation Right Tine Right Place >

Right Time Right Place

artist-curated exhibition examining different approaches to working in the public sphere, curated by Katharina Gruzei Monira Foundation, Mana Contemporary, Jersey City, NJ

October 8 – November 12, 2022

exhibition description >

Right Time, Right Place: a conversation, October 11, Austrian Cultural Forum, New York

link to (remarks_Austrian Culture Forum) 2022
the relativity of a right time and a right place >

Art for the Future: Artists Call and Central American Solidarities

curated by Erina Duganne and Abigail Satinsky

Aidekman Arts Center, Tufts University Art Galleries, Boston, MA

January 20 – April 24, 2022

exhibition description >

additional exhibition venues:

DePaul Art Museum, Chicago, IL

March 23 – August 23, 2023

The University of New Mexico Art Museum, Albuquerque, NM link >

September 6 – December 3, 2022

publication: Art for the Future: Artists Call and Central American Solidarities

Edited by Erina Duganne and Abigail Satinsky

Co-published by Inventory Press and Tufts University Art Galleries, 2022

available here >

review: Archived Opposition: “Art for the Future” at Tufts University Art Galleries

By Mahan Moalemi, Art in America, April 25, 2022

link >

2021

Monitor: Data, Surveillance and the New Panoptic

curated by Julie Poitras Santos

Institute of Contemporary Art at MECA, Portland, ME

October 1 – December 10, 2021

3rd printing of the free library and other histories, edition of 2,000 distributed free to the public through the Maine College of Art and a selection of Maine public libraries; aligning with the statewide Freedom & Captivity Initiative, a Humanities Initiative for an Abolitionist Future

https://www.freedomandcaptivity.org

2018

the free library and other histories

A second printing—available free to the public through the Lower Manhattan Network of New York Public Libraries NYPL: in the West Village at Jefferson Market Library, 425 6^thave @ 10^thStreet and Hudson Park Library, 66 Leroy Street; in the East Village at Tompkins Square Library, 331 east 10^thStreet; and on the Lower East Side at Seward Park Library, 192 East Broadway. The project will be available at these locations until the edition is depleted, beginning in May.

images below: Jefferson Market Library installation with large redactions.

the free library and other histories

A Project Commissioned by Franklin Furnace Archive, Inc. and The Pratt Institute Libraries as part of the annual exhibit and events series LIVE AT THE LIBRARY.

February 1– April 6, 2018

Pratt Institute Library, Brooklyn Campus, Main Floor

image above: FBI documents disclose surveillance of libraries, the Library Awareness Program; FOIA request submitted by National Security Archive; released November, 1989.

2017

a love story 2017

An artist book. This story, as it is revealed, becomes one of people and circumstance, a diaristic response to violence, to seduction, to the transmission of ideological power. It is a story of transference, as reality and fiction collide and interchange and empty stages become spaces within which projections merge and morph.

96 pages, color offset full page photographs , 10.5 x 8 inches, 268 x 199 mm edition of 500 printed at Die Keure, Brugge, Belgium July 2017

available at Printed Matter, Inc New York here

link to book >

from the archives:

an essay by Peter Fend on an early work intervene 1981. link to Peter’s essay and images of the project:

Intervene Peter Fend October 1981 >

intervene 1981 >

2015

the underground potato

a project by Ann Messner and Laurie Arbeiter

During the New Museum’s Ideas City festival on Saturday, May 30, 2015 the underground potato was deployed at the corner of Delancey and Essex Street on New York’s Lower East Side. Participation in the Ideas City was commissioned by Artists Alliance.

‘the underground potato’ >

a detailed project description and photos >

2014

Cuchifritos Gallery, Essex Street Market, and James Fuentes Gallery, New York, NY April 16-29 2014

Women Choose Women Again

New Jersey Arts Center, Summit, New Jersey

Curated by Mary Birmingham with Assistant Curator Katherine Murdock

January 17 – April 13 2014

Inspired by the historically important 1973 exhibition Woman Choose Women.

A group of artists from the original exhibition will each show one of their works and choose another female artist to participate in a new exhibition. Ann Messner selected by Joan Snyder.

2013

The Real Estate Show and Other Histories,

The Creative Time Summit 2013:

Art, Place, and Dislocation in the 21st-Century City;

Section 6: Resistors

moderated by Ivet Ćurlin of What, How and For Whom with Jimmy McMillan, Chen Shaoxiong, Levan Asabashvili, Urban Reactor

Skirball Center, NYU, NY

October 25-26 2013

archive:

http://creativetime.org/summit/speakers/ann-messner/

http://creativetime.org/summit/2013/10/26/ann-messner/

DuBois_the FBI files