Anna Li Nottinghamshire, United Kingdom
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Anna Li was born in 1994 in Odesa, Ukraine with the genetic disease SMA. Disabled and a wheelchair user. Earned a BA&MA in Art & Graphics from Uman State Pedagogical University (2012-2018) and a Certificate in Contemporary Art from the Institute "BAZA" (2021-2023). Fled from the 2022 Russian invasion, lives in Nottingham, UK. Currently undertaking a BA in Fine Art at Nottingham Trent University.
I’m an artist from Odesa, Ukraine, living in the UK. My practice explores the aesthetics and politics of disabled embodiment, drawing on my lived experience as a female wheelchair user and my background in both academic painting and post-Soviet Ukrainian conceptualism. I work across oil painting, video performance, digital media, and social interventions. My work often begins with my own body as a site of inquiry, resistance, and aesthetic experimentation. I position disability as a cultural lens and generative force that reshapes how we imagine beauty, intimacy, and agency. Visually and conceptually, I operate at the intersection of conceptual art, relational aesthetics, and figurative painting. I see myself in dialogue with the legacy of Odesa conceptualism, particularly its strategies of irony, language play, and critical distance. However, I diverge by foregrounding the non-normative body as an expressive, political subject, bringing emotional exposure and vulnerability into what was once largely cerebral.
