Anne Imhof

Power & paradise: Anne Imhof’s Golden Lion award-winning Faust performance gets an album release on Berlin’s PAN, Sep 13

3 September 2019

Anne Imhof is releasing an album accompaniment to performance and exhibition Faust via Berlin’s PAN off-shoot soundtrack series, Entopia, on September 13.

Described by the press release as “part documentation and part elaboration”, the piece expands on the several-hour long live event and Golden Lion Award winner, presented as part of the 57th Venice Biennale. In an AQNB review of the show in 2017, Hadden Manhattan asked, “Can the latent allusions to fascism implicit within Imhof’s work maintain criticality, or do they encourage a dark public fascination with the totalitarian theatrics of power?”

Imhof’s album collaboration with Eliza Douglas, Billy Bultheel and Franziska Aigner continues the conversation, with one of three anchoring tracks, ‘Queen Song’, premiering through PAN already, which you can listen to below:

See the PAN website for details.**

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Visceral but lifeless: violence & the value of the image in Venice Biennale winner Anne Imhof’s Faust

30 May 2017

Anne Imhof the artist emerged in the libidinal shadows of the European financial project in Frankfurt. Before entering the city’s famed Städelschule art academy, her first improvised work happened in its red light district — a boxing match in a strip club. A band played. Noses were bloodied and broken.

Eliza Douglas + Mickey Mahar in Anne Imhof’s ‘Angst II’, (2016). Performance view. Photo by Nadine Fraczkowski. Courtesy the artist + Hamburger Bahnhof Berlin.

Barely a decade later, the news that Giessen-born Imhof would be representing Germany at the 2017 Venice Biennale initially divided critics — from different corners she was claimed too young, too queer or too fascist. The artist responded with a proposition, equal parts provocative and epic: a seven-month long choreographed scenario encompassing the whole German pavilion, with sculptural and painterly interventions, and daily five-hour performances for the duration of the show, called Faust.

The architectural history of the building has long proved challenging for exhibiting artists. Replete with square columns, it was designed by Ernst Haiger in 1938 under the Nazi regime. Imhof encloses the kitsch palatial structure with temporary steel security gates. A couple of Doberman Pinschers are being calmed down by their handler, a muzzled aggression that foreshadows the action inside.

As well as being the German word for ‘fist,’ the title is borrowed from Goethe’s restless protagonist who sells his soul to the devil, later inspiring the overture by 19th century composer Richard Wagner, whom Adolf Hitler famously admired. Can the latent allusions to fascism implicit within Imhof’s work maintain criticality, or do they encourage a dark public fascination with the totalitarian theatrics of power?

Within Haiger’s original knave-like interior, the artist has constructed a platform in toughened glass, a material motif of an investment bank. This architectural mise-en-abyme — sharp transparent geometries set within an austere neoclassical interior — offers a disturbing read of contemporary Germany. The nation’s dominance within today’s neoliberal framework was itself born from the uterine shell of an autocratic regime.

Around the space is a considered disarray of ambivalent objects — tubes, an electric guitar, concrete sinks, sodden towels — that evoke Imhof’s personal history working as a bouncer at Frankfurt’s legendary nightclub Robert Johnson. It’s the world of nocturnal violence with the lights turned on. Performers move languidly but with precision. Hands are on throats, tenderness contorts into aggression; simple gestures of walking are slowed down, glances become gazes. The dynamics of control pervade these actions. The micro-movements demonstrate how organic beings buckle under abstract powers and systems, evoking the current political tensions as right-wing ideologies start to take hold.

 

definitely my favourite at the Venice Biennale this year #AnneImhof in the German pavilion 🎨 it was terrifying

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At one point, a group of slender, pale individuals huddle into a group, crouching under the transparent floor as if in a post-apocalyptic cell, lighting fires that generate drips of condensation on the glass above. At another, they mime their own sound-designed voices, individual tracks that coalesce into pop choral harmony. The atmosphere is oppressive in the most compelling of ways. The critique of capitalist acceleration and its ensuing alienation is embodied relationally — visceral but lifeless — like the neoliberal project that promises self-actualisation but instead delivers disaffection. Creating dark equivalences between clubbing, finance, fashion, and art, Imhof has a clear preoccupation with constellations of power, and a vocabulary with which to examine it. As her already rapid rise continues, the opportunities to explore this will undoubtedly multiply and grow exponentially in scale.

The gestural lexicon Imhof draws from is a universal of violence and alienation. These motions could be performed by any trained dancer, however they are not. Of late, there has been a specific directionality to Imhof’s casting. Many work as professional models occupying the Vetements-Balenciaga nexus in fashion circuits. And they are dressed accordingly, with slouched, oversized hoodies, ‘atheleisure’ track shorts. Curator Susanne Pfeffer describes Imhof’s troupe as “post-gender, individualized, peculiar and yet stereotypical.” Her performers hover between subjecthood and objecthood — somehow undead but with a beauty constructed in the zeitgeist. The motivations for Imhof’s employment of such figures becomes problematic within today’s hypervisualised image economy, where it is now near-obligatory for artists to generate documentation that can be shared over social networks. Once still, square-framed and flattened, Imhof’s work becomes void of critical urgency — slick and composed, seductive and infinitely Instagram-able.

 

@anne_imhof #faust #internationalekunstausstellung #anneimhof #labiennaledivenezia 🔥

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The presence and the image of Imhof’s work seem diametrically opposed. The pictures render aspirational the very condition the performances seem to critique. Elements that seem peripheral when viewed spatially take on a different aspect when captured photographically — the visual signifiers, the colours, the casting become means to generate traction and followers, as if optimised for digital consumption and dissemination. A twisted economy emerges between the real and the representation. Perhaps these seductive images serve as a sort of Trojan horse that deviously expands the scale of Imhof’s audience — a cult of undead, hyperconnected youth completely immersed in neoliberalism — giving the artist further material for critique to generate future performative work. Imhof may be acting like a canny banker constructing a derivative financial product to generate future profits.

Even if her intentions were revealed, it’s a gamble that seems risky — today’s technological infrastructure creates asymmetries in the market of meaning. A performance can be only experienced in an instant, its agency is confined. An image is infinitely more shareable and stored forever. Today, these representations are disambiguated by machines, their ambivalence exchanged for virality.  This affects how an artist like Imhof’s oeuvre is remembered — the violent complexities in the work simplified and commoditizable.

The artist’s success is simply a symptom of a wider phenomenon. Despite its flirtations with elements of a divisive German history, it is not Anne Imhof’s work in itself that contains fascism. Rather, the grains of totalitarianism are held in the infrastructural optics of contemporary art born in Silicon Valley, where the flattened image takes primacy over experience, and the digital subsumes the vital.**

 

Hunting the actors at #anneimhof #faust #germanpavillion

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Anne Imhof’s Faust is showing at the German Pavilion of the 57th Venice Biennale, running May 13 to November 26, 2017.

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Anne Imhof @ Hamburger Bahnhof, Nov 6

6 November 2015

Winner of the 2015 Preis der Nationalgalerie, Anne Imhof is presenting selected performances at Berlin’s Hamburger Bahnhof on November 6.

The Frankfurt and Paris-based artist will show a new work, ‘Forever Rage’, as part of the exhibition accompanying the Preis der Nationalgalerie award, an award given “to international artists under the age of 40 who live and work in Germany and who have opened new perspectives of art with innovative artistic approaches and impressive works.”

Imhof was recently exhibited at a solo exhibition and performance DEAL commissioned by New York’s MoMA PS1.

See the Facebook event page for details.**

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Marlie Mul + Life Gallery @ Vilma Gold, Feb 13 – Mar 21

13 February 2015

London’s Vilma Gold gallery is bringing two simultaneous exhibitions to its Minerva St. space, running consecutively from February 13 to March 21.

First is Berlin-based artist Marlie Mul and her solo exhibition, Arbeidsvitaminen. As the press image for the show hints, Mul’s show will bring more of her found object-like installations, physical materials disrupted, punctured, and repurposed, and left to do a silent striking, like her sand, resin and plastic puddles, or the spilled popcorn of her ‘Poppin’ Pollock’ installation with Morag Keil.

The second exhibition is by London’s Life Gallery, titled Our House in the Middle of Your Street and featuring Vittorio Brodmann, Manuela GernedelAnn Hirsch, Anne Imhof, ​and Holly White. After the joint opening with Mul on February 13, the exhibition will host a “Taylor Swift listening party” hosted by Emily Jones and Holly White, a workshop with White on March 7, and an evening screening of artists’ videos on March 17.

See the Vilma Gold exhibition page for details. **

marlie

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Pleasure Principles Pt. 2 @ 9 rue du Plâtre, Mar 27 – 29

26 March 2014

Part two of Paul Kneale and Raphael Hefti‘s Pleasure Principles group exhibition in Paris is opening at La Fondation d’entreprise Galeries Lafayette‘s 9 rue du Plâtre space, March 27 and running to March 29.

As much focussed on the human relationships around art as it the critical dialogue, Kneale and Hefti will finish up what is a two-part exhibition and group residency conducting “idiosyncratic research while nightly hosting dinners in the foundation’s ad hoc kitchen space”.

They return on the Thursday to host a concert by Anne Imhof and a performance by Bonny Poon, as well as a an off-site sound installation by Library+ co-founder Megan Rooney in Galeries Lafayette’s retail location at Boulevard Haussmann.

There’ll be a programme of talks, performances and music, poetry readings and lectures Friday through Saturday, including new additions to the original Pleasure Principles group with live musical guests Oona ft. Alexandra (Poon, Max Brand, Anna Susanna Woof-Dwight) and Paolo Thorsen-Nagel.

Read an interview with Paul Kneale and see the Pleasure Principles website for details. **

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