The Golden Lion winner describes how the interplay between music and performance emerged in her practice, as part of our Artist Talks series hosted in partnership with Fondation Beyeler.
One of the most important artists of her generation, Anne Imhof has established herself as a prominent figure in the contemporary art scene through her acclaimed, often unsettling durational works blending movement, sound and installation.
Anne Imhof shares how this distinctive interplay evolved in conversation with Hans Ulrich Obrist, Artistic Director of the Serpentine Galleries, in Frankfurt – a city that holds particular significance to the artist. It was here that she spent her formative years, teaching herself to draw and compose music while working as a nightclub bouncer, before enrolling in the city’s Städelschule artistic academy.
She builds up layers of performance and sound, likening the process to painting – a medium that is also central to her practice. “In both media there is the idea of layering,” she explains. “There is the idea of a superposition and an addition, and a taking away of abstraction and figuration, and it is precisely these areas of tension that interest me.”
Juxtaposing control and improvisation, Anne Imhof creates performative “fields of tension” that involve performers and audiences alike. She considers this dynamic crucial: “I think the situations arise by the very many decisions of individuals,” she says. “Those involved in the process and, above all of course, the creators, the performers, but also the spectators.”
“A lot comes about through doing,” she adds. “The coincidences and the mistakes play a big role.” From the operatic ‘ANGST’, staged in three parts, to her contribution to the 2017 Venice Biennale, ‘Faust,’ which won her the coveted Golden Lion, and her recent Carte Blanche exhibition “Natures Mortes” at Paris’s Palais de Tokyo, it is a process that has given rise to work which sears itself on the memory.
Artist Talks is a series presented by ۶Ƶ and the Fondation Beyeler which explores the life and work of some of the most influential contemporary artists working today.
