Alannah Louët

Berlin-based Interdisciplinary Irish Artist

01.10.2019  -  31.12.2019

Alannah Louët is a Berlin-based interdisciplinary artist, originally from Ireland. While Louët primarily works within the medium of photography, the distinct subject matter of each of her projects determines her various techniques, including installation, performance, film, and staged photo events.

Citing avant-garde film director Vera Cytilova, known for her anti-patriarchal views as an inspiration, her work often has a satirical element with dark undertones, creating scenes that are both playful and haunting. Other sources of inspiration for the artist include Karl Marx’s writings on social reproduction; which refers to the organisation of sexuality and control of biological reproduction, and Silvia Federici’s books on ‘the witch hunt’ which explore the causes of interpersonal and institutional violence against women. Her upbringing in Catholic Ireland also largely informs her work.

The artist often focuses on historical references, ranging from the violent history of Catholicism, to female autonomy, issues of domestic and reproductive labour, and the importance of the otherworldly and the occult in female history. She is also concerned with the concept of truth in photography, particularly in relation to the occult; as there is an oversaturation of photographs that attempted to record the phenomenon. Although the images are obviously fake, the artist was inspired by the performance depicted within them.

Louët’s conceptual and interdisciplinary approach often produces eerie, antiquated imagery, predicated on the supernatural and aiming to celebrate the performance of female psychics, drawing especially on the movements observed during transfiguration and the projection of ectoplasm. There is also a strong reference to domesticity in her work as psychics or mediums were one of the first professions to be associated with women outside of reproduction and domestic labor.

As Louët states:

While I use a variety of materials and processes in each project, my methodology is consistent. I use domestic objects and acts to satirically outline what is obvious and what is hidden. In my latest work, I aim to provoke a sense of eeriness through sound, aesthetics, and movement. To make a work eerie is important as I think art in some ways should take you somewhere you feel unfamiliar with, even if it deals with political or social matters.

Alannah Louët, Artist’s Statement

As part of a SomoS Artist-in-Residence in Winter 2019, the artist developed and presented new performative works and resulting video installations in her solo exhibition Emanations, revolving around domestic confinement and thingness; a theory that focuses on human-object interactions and the distinction between objects and things, proposing that an object becomes a thing when it can no longer serve its common function.


Louët achieved a First Class Honours Degree, BA in Photography at the London College of Communication University of the Arts, London in 2019. She has extensive photography experience, specializing in analog photography and B&W darkroom printing, including alternative printing processes such as liquid emulsion.


Alannah Louët homepage