Ayla Pierrot Arendt

Ayla Pierrot Arendt (*1987) is a visual artist and director. Following her studies in painting at the Academy of Fine Arts in Vienna (2006–2011) and a master’s degree in Choreography and Performance from the Institute for Applied Theater Studies in Gießen (2012–2016), Arendt creates interdisciplinary productions that serve as feminist reinterpretations of literary, historical, and mythological sources. These are deeply connected to contemporary social and political issues. Her innovative integration of spatial concepts, gaze direction, and video editing further distinguishes her work, offering an immersive experience for the audience.

Arendt employs a dialogical working method, collaborating with experts and artists from diverse disciplines and cultural backgrounds to examine social tensions and cultural narratives. She updates these narratives through the lens of global crises while maintaining both regional and international perspectives. Residencies, such as her time in Tel Aviv in 2023 and her repeated stays in Georgia between 2022 and 2024, have enabled her to conduct intensive on-site research and engage in close collaborations with local artists, musicians, and activists. 

Since 2007, her experimental video works have been featured at prestigious festivals, including the Videonale at the Kunstmuseum Bonn and the European Media Arts Festival in Osnabrück. Since 2015, she has premiered her so-called "video choreographies" and multimedia operas at prominent venues such as the Künstler*innenhaus Mousonturm in Frankfurt.

The video opera Death in Peace took shape against the backdrop of the anti-government protests sweeping through the streets of Tbilisi in the spring of 2024. In Ayla Pierrot Arendt’s piece, embedded in the unsettling soundscape by composer duo Nika Pasuri and Ani Zakareishvili, the protagonists of three different nationalities meet on four screens: two Georgians, two Germans, and a Russian in exile in Georgia. With their respective ideas of peace and freedom, friend and foe, inseparable from their political biographies, they encounter one another in the story of the Georgian Natia and the Russian deserter Andrej. And it is not long before Andrej is dead, shot in the German embassy in Tbilisi, of all places, by the ambassador’s husband. His accidental death raises many questions: the price of freedom, the limits of diplomacy, the gaps and myths of collective identity and loyalties – fuelled by mounting fears in an uneasy, conflict-ridden Europe.