Anna Li

 Introducing our next Resident Artist: Anna Li

Born in Odesa and now based in the UK, Anna Li brings a practice as layered and uncompromising as the city that shaped her. Working across oil painting, video performance, digital media, and social interventions, she draws on her lived experience as a female wheelchair user to position disability not as limitation, but as a cultural lens — one that reframes beauty, intimacy, and political agency from the ground up.

Anna's work is rooted in the body: her own body, as a site of inquiry, resistance, and aesthetic experimentation. She begins there, and builds outward. The result is a practice that is simultaneously intimate and structural, confessional and conceptual — one that refuses the separation between the personal and the political.

Trained in academic painting and steeped in the tradition of post-Soviet Ukrainian conceptualism, Anna works in conscious dialogue with the legacy of Odesa conceptualism — its irony, its language play, its critical distance. But she diverges sharply from that tradition's cool cerebralism, insisting on emotional exposure and vulnerability as equally rigorous artistic modes. The non-normative body enters her work not as subject matter, but as expressive force and political subject.

Situated at the intersection of conceptual art, relational aesthetics, and figurative painting, Anna Li's practice asks what it means to imagine the world differently — not despite the body, but through it.

We are honoured to welcome her.

Bio

 Anna Li is a Ukrainian-born multimedia artist based in the UK whose practice explores disabled embodiment, intimacy, and the politics of visibility through painting, performance, video, and writing.
Working from her lived experience as a wheelchair user, she develops adaptive painting methods that foreground uncertainty, softness, and the body as a site of knowledge.
Her work brings disability into dialogue with art history, sexuality, and public space, reframing limitation as an aesthetic and conceptual method.

This month we have three of Anna’s painting’s and a film to show you.

This issue explores accessible painting as an embodied practice shaped by disability, fatigue, and adaptation. Through process footage, voiceover and practical insights, the guide shares how limitation can become a generative artistic method. It invites artists to rethink control, productivity, and studio practice through softness, pauses, and material dialogue.