OONA: Self-sovereignty.
Which is just a fancy way of expressing the idea that I am in charge of my body, my money, my creativity, and my life. It’s a radical approach to the self – taking complete ownership of every aspect of my identity and way of being.

OONA: Sometimes, I consider myself a feminist artist and an activist. I’m also an anonymous artist, a performance artist, and a crypto artist. Depending on the day, I am either a brilliant artist or a very bad one. Sometimes, I perform; most times, those performances engage with technology, and almost always, they explore identity.
The activist question is tricky. When I think of contemporary activism, two archetypes come to mind: one I admire, the other less so. There’s the Emma Sulkowicz type: she carried her mattress, the site of her rape, across her college campus until graduation. Then there are the oil-painting destroyers: once provocative, now repetitive and headline-chasing. I’d be disappointed to be lumped in with the latter but proud to create work with strong intent and lasting impact like the former.
In this lifetime, I happen to inhabit a female body, and I’m asking what it means to exist – as a woman who makes art. Feminism is one of the tools I use to navigate the weight, wonder, and weirdness of that experience. How do I translate the view from my eyes, my breasts, my body into art? If my pussy could talk, what would she like to say?
Feminism is not about gatekeeping womanhood, nor is it man-hating. Feminism is a collection of ideas, like seeds, that, if nurtured, give way to greater intuition and freedom of choice.

OONA: Labels, when applied to artists, should be used as launching pads, not intellectual cages.
If someone writes off my work as “feminist” and moves on, that is their loss. I’m not here to coddle small minds or peens. In my pursuit of knowledge and in my expression of wisdom through art, feminism is a great starting point, but feminism is certainly far from the final destination.

OONA: I never show my face, but my body is often on display. Without my face, my body becomes more like a canvas – a (literal and physical) abstraction to explore the female form.
I used to have silicone breast implants; I explanted them. Now, in a performance called Look Touch Own, I invite people, one by one, to touch my breasts and the implants that were once inside me. The tension between anonymity and intimacy is intense. I’m letting strangers touch my scars, but they can’t see my face. It’s privacy vs. intimacy, honesty vs. visibility.
Anonymity serves as armor in my guerrilla performances. I’ve been kicked out of Art Basel Miami, the MoMA, and the Met for these performances. When Sotheby’s curated an all-male glitch art show – a movement founded by a trans woman in the 1970s – I publicly called them out until they re-curated the show. In these instances, the anonymity my mask provides is a signal of something renegade, something radical enough to warrant invisibility. The idea is bigger than the individual.

Plus, the mask means I don’t really have to fuss with makeup.

OONA: My anonymity is whatever the audience projects onto it; it shifts from person to person.
Without a face, some people treat me like a toy or an object of desire. During Look Touch Own in Los Angeles, a woman messaged me for days afterward, begging for forgiveness because she “treated me like a plaything and didn’t know why.” (She did indeed treat me like a plaything; she is one of the few women who juggled my implants and tried to juggle my real breasts as well.)
When I’m in wealthier crowds, people sometimes assume I’m an escort, and I can always tell. Once, I was at a small event presenting Touched, a dynamic artwork tracking G7 asylum trends using UNHCR data. At the start of the evening, a woman rudely dismissed me and even told her husband not to speak to me. (I can only assume it was because she knew he enjoys meeting escorts.) Then she heard me speak. Once she understood my anonymity and its purpose, we spent the rest of the night chatting. We got along super well. I love moments like that – when people show they can change their minds… emotional and creative flexibility in action.

My favorite reaction to my mask is, of course, curiosity. I meet so many beautifully curious people who talk about all types of wonderful ideas with OONA.

OONA: I’m not sure I could answer that, even if I wanted to. I don’t really want to “fight,” but that doesn’t mean I just want to make art about “pretty shapes.”
Anger + Love = Passion. Sadness + Love = Empathy. And laughter is supreme.
I’m creating art with all three: passion, empathy, and humor.
In performances like Look Touch Own, I’m performing along a sliding scale of anger and sadness… anger at how often women’s bodily boundaries are violated, and sadness at the harm women inflict on themselves in the name of beauty.
In other works, I like to be playful. In Spread, a video art collaboration with Lori Baldwin, I mapped out the gender pay gap in art sales using butter. Taking big, heavy topics and breaking them down into absurdity is its own form of resistance.

OONA: My work will live forever, and no one but me can tell me what to do! Conceptually, I’m deeply attracted to the potential of blockchain technology, crypto, and NFTs. I believe it offers a revolutionary approach to ownership. In its “purest” form, blockchain technology allows us to create entirely new metrics of value – ones that challenge traditional gatekeepers and hierarchies in the art world.
For performance art, an ephemeral (and esoteric) medium that resists objectification, blockchain opens up a lot of possibilities. It allows me to assign tangible value to intangible moments, preserving my performances in a way that transcends their original context. The sale or transaction is, in many ways, an extension of the performance.
It’s also empowering. I wouldn’t have a practice if I had to rely on the traditional art world hierarchy. I’m too wild for white walls. Blockchain redistributes power, allowing artists to connect directly with their audiences without intermediaries. I love that I know my collectors and the people who support my practice.

OONA: This technology is only as good as the people who use it. In other words, it does not live up to its potential.

N: That’s really interesting. When you’re making the music, you’re often not thinking about these things actually. Those are mostly people from the outside, that put things in boxes or say and write about it. When I am sitting down at my desk and start putting together a demo, these things aren’t even crossing my mind. What is important to me, always, is that I don’t just make a song because it works well on the internet. I get the feeling that the things I have put out there sometimes vary greatly, stile-wise. Of course, there are people saying it’s New German New Wave (NNDW) or Post Punk. But I like to keep things open regarding genre. My new album once again has a very different sound. And the songs themselves also differ greatly from each other. The only red hook across all of them I like to keep an eye on, is that I myself enjoy listening to them.

N: I actually write very little. On my upcoming album are all the songs I wrote within the last year. Not many get thrown out. In the evening, I just sit down in my little music room with my laptop, and just try to play anything. Either I like it or I notice right away it’s not working out that day. And then I stop immediately. Because then I would associate this pressure of writing a song with the feeling of wanting to make music. And I don’t like that. But if it just sort of flows easily, then I finish the sketch of the song relatively quickly. It takes about an hour and then I have the song. But that’s a rare occurrence and it happens less and less. I have the feeling that it was easier for me to write music back in my hometown. Living in a loud and busy city, I just don’t have the desire anymore to be loud myself. Back in the village it was so suffocatingly quiet, I really needed to be loud. 

There is so much music out there, and if people listen to me, which is already a privilege, then I don’t want to take up the time that is given to me by putting things out there I don’t actually feel like talking about. So I try to reduce it. Which is of course quite detrimental for my releases and marketing. (laughs) 

N: It’s really important to me, yes. I notice that a song is good if I start walking around in my room and a vision of what the music video would look like starts forming in my head. I don’t overthink it that much. A film just starts rolling, then I know: Ok, this song works, it sucks me in. This was the case for an upcoming single. Being in my studio, I thought: I really need a scene with semaphore flags, even though that has nothing to do with the song. It just happened on its own.
I have Marina and Caroline Ida that always support me with this. Marina, I’ve known for three years now. She somehow had a song of mine in her playlist, then I followed her on Instagram. She posted in her story that she wants to film a music video, so I just sent her my first song, 222, and she said “let’s go”. I told her I had no money, but she wanted to do it regardless. We actually met just over there, at the Schrebergärten at Tempelhofer Feld. She came with her camera already loaded up and we started shooting right away. Since then, we’ve become really good friends.