Anna Koyn’s practice begins with the things that surround us every day: advertising, beauty products, packaging, social media, and the endless stream of images that tell us who we could be. Working across collage, installation, video, and mixed media, she looks at how these elements shape our desires and, ultimately, our sense of self.
Her ongoing project One-Dimensional Woman grew out of this close observation of everyday life. The project took shape gradually, as Koyn began to notice the changing relationship between people and the things they consume. Moving homes with her family, she found herself surrounded by large quantities of objects that had been bought, unpacked, and never used. The experience made her think about how much of the pleasure of consumption now lies in the act of buying itself.
Social media creates a constant sense of abundance — of new people, new images, new products, and new possibilities. If something is always available to replace what we already have, she suggests, it can become harder to value what is already there. The logic of consumption begins to affect not only what we buy, but also how we relate to other people and how we construct our own identities.
Anna Koyn, still from Social Prenup, single-channel video, 2026
This is the broader territory of One-Dimensional Woman. The title refers to Herbert Marcuse’s One-Dimensional Man and his idea that consumer society can shape people's needs while making those needs feel entirely personal. “I was interested in the idea that consumer society forms our needs for us, rather than us forming them ourselves,” Koyn explains. “We perceive them as our own desires.”
Koyn explores this idea through the contemporary female experience. Women are offered new ways to express their individuality, yet these choices are often shaped by the same expectations: to look younger, stay thin, be successful, improve the body, and continually work on oneself. “We are constantly told who we should become, what we should buy, and what we are expected to improve about ourselves,” she says. “It is an endless race.”
For Anna Koyn, the issue is not beauty, fashion, or self-care themselves. She acknowledges her own pleasure in them. What interests her is the point at which a personal preference starts to feel like an obligation. “The most important question we should always ask ourselves when making a choice is: can I refuse without feeling ashamed?” she says. If refusing a certain ideal creates the feeling that something is wrong with us, choice can easily turn into pressure.
Her work is connected to feminist concerns, but she sees the subject more broadly. Even something as ordinary as buying lipstick can raise questions about agency: who wants it, why they want it, and whether the desire is really their own. She is also interested in the way brands adopt the language of feminism and other social movements as part of their marketing. The message may appear empowering, while still serving the logic of consumption.
Anna Koyn deliberately borrows from advertising, branding, and commerce. Brands, she notes, often promise much more than the product itself can provide: confidence, beauty, belonging, or a new version of oneself. She is interested in what happens immediately after that first moment of attraction. “I want to hold on to the moment of recognition,” she says. “At first, the viewer sees something attractive and familiar, and then begins to wonder: why do I believe this? Why does it attract me? What exactly is being offered to me, and why do I want to buy it?”
Collage has become a natural medium for exploring these questions. Anna Koyn sees it as closely connected to the way identity is formed today. We assemble our sense of ourselves from fragments of advertising, social media, other people's images, personal desires, memories, and expectations. “It is close to the way identity is formed today,” she says. “We assemble our idea of ourselves from completely different fragments.”
Anna Koyn, Soft Control, 2026
Anna Koyn, Recommended for You, 2026
By taking recognizable images out of their original context and placing them alongside unexpected elements, she shifts their meaning. Anna usually begins with something ordinary that catches her attention — an advertisement, a familiar phrase, or the way people behave when they shop. She then tries to understand why it caught her attention and what larger question might lie behind it. Images, words, packaging, and other materials are collected and combined, with the work developing through experimentation.
“The concept and the visual work always develop together,” she says. “I don't always begin with a ready-made answer. The idea can change in the process, and it is important for me to leave room for new conclusions.”
AI has become both a tool and a subject of Koyn’s practice. She uses it in her video works to animate collages and create situations that would be difficult or impossible to stage in real life. But her interest in the technology goes beyond its practical possibilities. Because AI is increasingly involved in producing the images and ideas that shape our desires, it has also become part of what Koyn is examining in her work.
For the artist, this raises a question that follows directly from One-Dimensional Woman: “If an algorithm creates something that is supposed to appeal to us, how much do our desires remain our own?”
She approaches AI with both enthusiasm and caution. As an artist, she values the freedom it offers, particularly the ability to experiment and realize ideas that once required large teams and budgets. But she is equally interested in its effects on attention, desire, and trust. “When it becomes increasingly difficult to distinguish the real from what has been created, who will determine our picture of the world?” she asks.
Her work does not argue for abandoning consumption, technology, beauty, or the pleasures they can offer. Instead, it asks us to pause before accepting them as entirely our own. In that pause — between attraction and awareness, desire and reflection — Anna Koyn finds the possibility of making a choice that is genuinely personal.
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