Anne Glassner

In her new work, Anne Glassner examines the history of female tobacco workers in Krems-Stein based on the life story of her great-grandmother Franziska. Personal memories converge with collective experiences, and private archives converge with social history and female work biographies. The Stein tobacco factory represents female labor, solidarity, and resistant care. Glassner asks how these forms of cohesion have been inscribed in bodies, spaces, and memories, and how they continue to impact the present day.

In the exhibition, personal objects belonging to the great-grandmother engage in dialogue with contemporary works by the artist. The apartment of the tobacco worker on Dr.-Karl-Dorrek-Straße, which still exists today, serves as the setting for a surreal, dreamlike scenario in which places appear to come to life and the body of memory becomes visible. 

The installation features a photograph of the artist sleeping in homemade pajamas at the Linz tobacco factory. This quiet gesture of retreat is an act of refusal and solidarity created during her scholarship at the VALIE EXPORT CENTER in 2023.

Voices of female tobacco workers interweave with artistic settings, opening up a space to ask questions about what remains of a life, a community, and a working world that seems to have disappeared. This space also explores how archives can be opened up to make female history and stories audible and visible.

Anne Glassner was born in Vienna in 1984. She studied fine arts at the University of Applied Arts Vienna, transmedia art with Brigitte Kowanz, and art history. In 2008, she received her diploma in art education from the Academy of Fine Arts.