"Viva Arte Viva" - Venice Biennale - Anne Imhof and the German Pavilion
The time has come - the opening week of the Venice Biennale just started. Already on Monday, industry professionals posted their first arrival pictures. Media representatives gather around the venues Giardini and Arsenale. Today is the official opening of the national pavilions. In the middle, Anne Imhof is right inside with her team. They perform in the German Pavilion.
Anne Imhof, who was born in Hessian Giessen in 1978, is a universal artist. Her artworks include drawings, paintings, music, installative and performative works. Anne Imhof creates three-dimensional art experiences with her works.
Her career took off within a few years. She studied Visual Communication and enrolled at the Städelschule in Frankfurt am Main in 2008 where she finished her studies as a masterclass under Judith Hopf in 2012, she was awarded with the Graduate Prize for her graduation. Moreover, her piece “School of the Seven bells – 1st of least four war” was honoured as performance and as piece of music in choreographed and improvised movements as an allegory of constant giving and taking in the Museum of Modern Art Frankfurt.
In the meantime, Imhof had exhibitions and performances in many museums in Europe, and in 2015 even at the Museum of Modern Art PS1 in New York. Last summer, she played the Hamburger Bahnhof in Berlin with "Angst II", after receiving the prize of the National Gallery for Young Art. Since May last year, Anne Imhof has developed her works in space and time for Venice.
The 57th Art Biennial has the motto "Viva Arteviva". The curator of the main exhibition is Chistine Macel from the Pompidou Center in Paris. She provided the title this year, deliberately non-political. The art and its artists should be in the middle. The curator for the German Pavilion will be Susanne Pfeffer from the Museum Fridericianum in Kassel for the first time this year. For her, Anne Imhof is the perfect choice, as "Imhof makes the space visible between body and reality in which our personality emerges at first."
In her performance "Faust", the Giessen artist Imhof presents the bodies of individual performers on a freestanding glass pedestals that move in a "construction between power and helplessness, arbitrariness and violence, resistance and freedom". In font of that scene, in as separate field, barking dogs guard the house.
The International Art Exhibition in Venice runs from 13th May to 26th November 2017. The best country contribution out of the pavilions is awarded the Golden Lion.
