Anna Scherbyna (b. 1988, Zaporizhia, Ukraine) is an artist, curator, and filmmaker based in Berlin. She studied at the National Academy of Fine Arts and Architecture in Kyiv (2009–2015), and completed her postgraduate studies in the Expanded Cinema class with Clemens von Wedemeyer at the Academy of Visual Arts Leipzig in 2025.
Working across video, drawing, and painting, Scherbyna engages with the critical potential of diverse media to explore themes of trauma, dreams, gender performativity, and violence. Her practice interrogates how power and knowledge are distributed, often drawing on the subconscious as a method of inquiry and a site of resistance.
Scherbyna’s work moves between the individual and the collective, mapping the affective residue of historical rupture onto the surface of the present. She explores the ways in which subjectivity is shaped—and destabilized—by forces both intimate and systemic. Her visual and curatorial strategies resist fixed meaning, instead opening up spaces for vulnerability, fragmentation, and political tension.
Filmography:
Scales, 2024 — director, writer;
Sisters, 2019 — co-director, co-writer (with Valentina Petrova)
Film Festivals:
e-flux Film Award, 2025;
goEast, Germany, 2021;
La Fête du Slip's, Switzerland, 2021;
Internationale Kurzfilmtage Winterthur, Switzerland, 2020;
Molodist Kyiv International Film Festival, Ukraine, 2019
Awards:
2025 e-flux Film Award (honorable mention)
2022 Dieter Ruckhaberle Award (together with Uliana Bychenkova)
2020 Nomination for Pinchuk Art Center Prize
Residencies:
2022 Künstlerhof Frohnau;
Akademie Schloss Solitude Fellowship;
2021 Ukrainian-Austrian Art Residency Temporary Un/Availability;
2020 Residency in Beriznitsky Art Foundation Gallery, Kyiv;
2019 Labirynt gallery, Lublin, Poland
2024
Observe this Moment — How it Convulses, Arsenal Gallery, Bialystok
Kyiv Perennial, Station Urbaner Kulturen/NGbK Hellersdorf, Berlin
Patterns of Seeing and Not Seeing, after the butcher, Berlin
2023
Exhibition of Antiwarcoalition, ZKM, Karlsruhe
Zwischen dir und uns: ein Versuch der Übersetzung, Open Space, Chemnitz
How Do We Turn Salt Into Sugar, Gallery Etage, Berlin
To Watch the War: The Moving Image Amidst the Invasion of Ukraine, BAK, Utrecht
2022
20th SURVIVAL Art Review, Wroclaw
Women at War, Fridman Gallery, New York
Imagine Ukraine – Art as a Critical Attitude, M HKA, Antwerp;
Summerfest, Akademie Schloss Solitude, Stuttgart
Temporary Un/Availability, Mala Gallery of Mystetskyi Arsenal, Kyiv
I was approaching to a city that I hadn't known yet, Artsvit Gallery, Dnipro