Exhibition text (PDF)
Press images (ZIP)
Leere Blicke, leere Gesten, voller Angst, Basellandschaftliche Zeitung (06/2016)
Anne Imhof’s Electrifying Show at Kunsthalle Basel Is the Week’s Unexpected High Point, artnet News (06/2016)
Choreographed Layers, Mousse Magazine (06/2016)
Around Town: Basel, Frieze (07/2016)
Angst, Anne Imhof, ma culture (07/2016)
Remote Control, artforum (09/2016)
Anne Imhof (b. 1978), recent winner of the Preis der Nationalgalerie 2015 for young artists, presents an audacious new commission that combines her interests in performance, painting, and installation with a live element that will extend over the duration of the exhibition. Here, Imhof presents the first act of an “opera” of sorts composed by the artist in several acts and constructed through a choreography of cryptic gestures, an abstract musical composition, and sculptural elements. The opera’s various characters—which ephemerally appear, occasionally coincide, and leave traces of their presence in the exhibition—are played by amateur and formally trained performers. Each has a name, as in the Lover, the Diver, the Spitter, or the Prophet (played by a live falcon). Together they continuously form and un-form what could be called the “images” that make up the piece and give sense to the enigmatic sculptural scenography that forms their backdrop. The whole expands on Imhof’s signature vocabulary and materials, from her exploration of task-like movements and acceleration to her frequent use of dripping liquids and branded comestibles, like Pepsi. In the process, Angst, true to the artist’s larger practice, troubles the boundaries of the body, time, and the fleeting images created between them. With Franziska Aigner, Billy Bultheel, Ekaterina Cheraneva, Frances Chiaverini, Emma Daniel, Eliza Douglas, David Imhof, Josh Johnson, Mickey Mahar, Enad Marouf, Lea Welsch.