Anna Knöller
- Anna Lilli Garai
- Sep 26
- 2 min read
Anna Knöller’s work grows out of a curiosity for how law and its spaces are staged. She spends time in courtrooms, follows trials, and speaks with those involved, collecting fragments that later return in installations, performances, and interventions. For her, the courtroom is not only a place of judgment but also a carefully arranged setting, with its own rituals, symbols, and movements.
In projects like “Vor Gericht” and “Im Prozess” she looks at these rituals through performance. A dancer in “Vor Gericht” mirrored the architecture and atmosphere of the Munich District Court, turning elements of hierarchy and order into movement.
“Im Prozess” worked with actors to restage parts of trials, underlining how much of the legal process has a theatrical side. In “B277/II” she brought furniture and protective gear from a Munich courtroom into Kunsthalle Mannheim, carrying the weight and tension of a trial into the exhibition space.
Corpus Delicti - Installation (concrete & chalk), 2025
Her practice often includes drawings, notations, and sound, which act as tools to map what usually stays invisible. These traces then form the base for installations where visitors are drawn into a space shaped by research and performance. Works like “Corpus Delicti” or “ICC numerus” continue this line, asking how systems of law are not only written in books but also expressed in rooms, gestures, and rhythms.
What comes through in her work is an interest in the everyday staging of authority. By pulling the language of trials and their spaces into an artistic frame, Knöller opens them up for a different kind of attention, one that is less about verdicts and more about how justice looks, feels, and moves.
