ANNE IMHOF TO REPRESENT GERMANY AT 2017 VENICE BIENNALE

Anne Imhof has been selected to represent Germany at the Fifty-Seventh Venice Biennale, which will be held from May 13 to November 26, 2017. Susanne Pfeffer, director of the Museum Fridericianum in Kassel, will curate the pavilion.

Born in 1978, the Frankfurt- and Paris-based artist is best known for works that explore the history of performance. In 2015, her work Deal premiered at MoMA PS1; this year, her three-part work Angst played to much acclaim across three separate venues: the Kunsthalle Basel, the Hamburger Bahnhof in Berlin, and the Musée d’Art Contemporain de Montréal as part of La Biennale de Montréal. Last year she won the biennial Nationalgalerie Prize for Young Art. Imhof has been working on “a spatially as well as temporally expansive work” for the pavilion since May.

In the September 2016 issue of Artforum, Kerstin Stakemeier examined Angst. She writes, “Imhof negates the economic idea of progress through siderealism. For Imhof, this also entails constantly undermining our role as audience or public, undercutting any position of distanced, critical judgment through subtle assertions of control.”