CV · Artist’s website · Press
Yana Tsegay investigates how historical and spatial regimes are materialized and experienced through the affective residues of a place. Working with installation, performance, painting, and text, she examines architecture, monuments, museum displays, and landscapes as spaces where historical narratives, cultural myths, and relations of power are continuously produced and negotiated.
Grounded in speculative artistic research rather than autobiographical narration, her practice explores how history can be re-read, appropriated, and transformed through painting and spatial intervention. One recurring point of departure is the cave, understood as a site where painting, cultural history, and ideas of primordiality intersect. Alongside the cave, Tsegay engages with historical events and cultural sites—including the invention of fire and the Amber Room—as starting points for reshaping historical narratives through painting. By treating the history of painting as malleable and open to appropriation, she creates space for alternative forms of historical authorship.
Yana Tsegay’s sustained interest in monumentality and the politics of space is informed by Afrodiasporic and post-socialist perspectives. Whether working through installations, performances, or interventions within exhibition displays, she investigates how institutional spaces embody and reproduce cultural concepts and how moments of displacement can open them to new readings and modes of experience.
Gallery exhibitions
2027 solo show (upcoming)
2023 I. S. Kalter | Yana Tsegay
2019 The Amber Room
Further solo exhibitions (selection)
2022 The Invention of Fire, basis Projektraum, Frankfurt am Main, DE
2020 The White Hut, as part of OADE#2, curated by KVTV, Grüne Lunge, Frankfurt am Main, DE
Selected works
To enquire please email at info@mountains.gallery
Yana Tsegay, Weggeatmet / Platanen Halluzination, 2025 · Acrylic on coated paper · 250 × 360 cm
Performance, Yana Tsegay, Arid Fountation, Ernst-Reuter-Platz, Berlin, 2025 · Documentation: Arootin Mirzakhani
Yana Tsegay, Wallpaper / Allergic Hallucination I, 2024–2025 · Photo: Tamara Eda Temuçin
Yana Tsegay, Wallpaper / Allergic Hallucination IV, 2024–2025 · Photo: Tamara Eda Temuçin
Performance, Yana Tsegay, Tomb Raid, Humboldt Forum / City Palace, Berlin, 2025 · Documentation: Sarah Reva Mohr
Yana Tsegay, Bat Wallpaper / Night Vision and Bat Wallpaper / Hibernation, both 2024 · Acrylic on coated paper · 240 × 250 cm each · Installation view in Lucyʼs Handbag, La Station, Nice, 2025 · Photo: Eleonora Paciullo
Exhibition view, Yana Tsegay, The Collection of Babylon Rage, curated by Alexander Puetz, Moltkerei Werkstatt, Cologne, 2023. Photo: Bernhard Adams
Yana Tsegay, Pangea / Split Apart Faster, 2022–2023 · Acrylic and molding paste (painted frame) on nettle fabric · 140 × 80 × 2 cm
Yana Tsegay, Giant Track / Found in Rocks, 2022–2023 · Acrylic and molding paste (painted frame) on nettle fabric · 140 × 80 × 2 cm
Yana Tsegay, Giant Track / The Trackmakers, 2022–2023 · Acrylic and molding paste (painted frame) on nettle fabric · 140 × 80 × 2 cm
Yana Tsegay, Fossilization / Preservative Finishing Touch, 2023 · Acrylic on nettle fabric · 30 × 25 × 2 cm
Yana Tsegay, from A Natural History Of (Senckenberg Museum), 2023 · Photo-performance / direct print on acrylic glass · 37 × 25 × 1 cm
Yana Tsegay, from A Natural History Of (Senckenberg Museum), 2023 · Photo-performance / direct print on acrylic glass · 37 × 25 × 1 cm
Yana Tsegay, Imagining a Flame / Mural, 2022 · Acrylic paint, oil stick, fur on nettle · 140 × 180 cm
Exhibition view, Yana Tsegay, The Amber Room, Mountains, Berlin, 2019
Yana Tsegay, Bernstein-Paneel I, 2019 · Acrylic, oil stick, fur, polymeres on cotton · 140 × 180 × 2 cm
Yana Tsegay, Bernstein-Paneel I (detail), 2019 · Painted clay, sculpture · 60 cm × 16 cm × 14 cm
Yana Tsegay, Amber Medallion, 2019 · Isomalt and fur · 26 × 25 × 1 cm
Yana Tsegay, Amber Plate, 2019 · Isomalt and fur · 52 × 28 cm
Yana Tsegay, Untitled (Cave Painting 2), 2019 · Installation view in ORBIT, curated by Arthur Loewen and Béla Feldberg, Messeturm, Frankfurt, 2020
Yana Tsegay, Cave of Rave, 2017 · Acrylic, oil, crayons and interference pigments on nettle · 140 × 180 cm
Yana Tsegay, Gedanken über Konsistenz (Tellicherry), 2017 · Acrylic, oil, charcoal and interference pigments on cotton · 140 × 180 × 2 cm