Anu Vahtra (b. 1982) is an artist working in the photo-and installation medium. She employs an artistic approach to site-specific, space-oriented problematics, and focuses on exhibition format and specifics of exhibition space, initiated by architectural characters, and a historical and contextual background. Her installations play with the spectator’s memory and senses, grasping the whole space while altering it as the content and format of the work. Vahtra’s work has been described as analytical archaeology. She currently works as the head of MA Contemporary Art program at the Estonian Academy of Arts. She has participated in numerous group exhibitions internationally, and has had solo exhibitions in Amsterdam, Brussels, Budapest, Cologne, New York, Prague and Tallinn. She has been nominated for the Kristjan Raud Prize in 2015 and the Sadolin Art Prize in 2014. In 2015 she won the Köler Prize 2015 grand prix, and in 2017 received the Annual Award of the Cultural Endowment of Estonia’s Foundation for Fine and Applied Arts. One of her most recent solo exhibition was in 2021 in Amsterdam at P/////AKT exhibition space called „Goodbye air pollution, the future is here.”
