*Anja Schnaars studied graphic design with focus on animation and illustration at the Hochschule für Künste HfK Bremen, graduating in 2001, and has been working as a freelancer ever since. For several years, she worked mainly as an illustrator, animator, and sometimes graphic designer, and only pursued independent projects rather unnoticed. In 2007 she had a teaching assignment for animation at Burg Giebichenstein Kunsthochschule Halle. In 2015, she decided to focus on her free artistic work, founded the edition TOLLWURSTREGEN for publishing word-picture works, primarily in the form of artist‘s booklets; these have been labeled with numerous prizes. Since 2022, she is a member of the Künstlerinnenverband Bremen, GEDOK, and has participated in exhibitions in Germany, Switzerland, Italy, and Spain.
Her artistic practice is both content-wise and formally a working through of what is given. She prefers to use everyday, trivial materials and uses them as symbols of the prevailing normality that needs to be dismantled. Formally, she likes to set herself fixed conceptual frameworks within which she acts associatively and playfully in an experimental flow. She works serially, multi- and transmedially, always focusing on the interplay of text and image, of content and form, and of profound thoughts and humor.
Consistently applying the artistic principle of disassembly and transformation, she appears under various (partly anagrammatic) pseudonyms; all these artistic pseudonym personalities form a personal unionist collective that cultivates individual characteristics, exchange, and mutual inspiration and presents itself and all fitting in one on www.wahre-freude.de .
During her residency in the Arbeitszimmer she appears as Cara Janhanss* and Anna Schnaarz*.