Deborah Schamoni

Present Future

“… [T]he shared sociality of the performance changes its character in Imhof’s art objects: it is singularized, broken
down into peaks. Imhof’s etchings on dibond, her sculptures and pencil, charcoal and pastel drawings are corresponding in the character of their mark making: a visual grammar of bruising, of scratches, holes, body parts, appendages that appear as exhumations from a before implicit streak within our social order that here comes to a full aesthetic life. Imhof’s works are physical without being expressive, affective without being sentimental.”
– Kerstin Stakemeier (May Journal, Autumn 2014.)

Rage, Anne Imhofs latest performance, deals with the relation between dominance and submission, slowness and passivity through structural motives in space. During the performance, the room unfolds around compositional axes,increasing steadily, fast and slanting, developing in-between the bodies of performers and the audience. A picture in time emerges, the relation of performer to performer transfers to the relation between performer and viewer. Language constitutes a horizon. Composed of different modes, it corresponds patterns of repetition and overlay that relate to the invisible, linguistic core of the piece.

Rage the film (2014) builds on the performance, adopting and carrying forward its movements and scored rhythm. Through the narrative of a subjective camera , the figures-set standards are drained towards their (enclosed) inherent figurative hollowness. Shot on a disused railway line in the middle of downtown Paris, the sense for the scale of the present - in time and space - is relieved of reality.

Curated by Jamie Stevens