Artists

Anna Ridler

Press release

In her second solo exhibition with Galerie Nagel Draxler, Anna Ridler brings together works that reflect on unstable systems of knowledge and the fragility of digital memory. Her practice repeatedly returns to the ephemerality of archives, language, and memory in an age shaped by automation and disappearing online infrastructures. Connecting earlier investigations into archives with her newest body of work centered on handwriting and transcription, Ridler reintroduces slowness, care, and material presence into processes usually governed by extraction and acceleration. "Writing by hand is one of the oldest recording technologies, requiring time, physical presence and sustained attention. Set against the scale and speed of automated data extraction, it becomes a deliberate countermeasure to digital decay. By transcribing captions onto paper, the work attempts to hold onto fragments of an Internet that is otherwise slipping out of reach, preserving what would normally remain abstracted, compressed or lost." – Anna Ridler Across the exhibition, recorded language reveals the cultural and social ideologies embedded within systems of documentation and classification. Revisiting her 2015 work "No Replacements Found", which examined systems of censorship and absence on online platforms, these questions gain renewed urgency today: what disappears, who decides what remains visible, and how can loss itself become archived? From islands gradually disappearing beneath rising sea levels to the countless representations of irises circulating online, Ridler's works trace forms of erosion across both physical and digital worlds. Together, they form a meditation on the decaying internet and on the trace that remains.