ANNE IMHOF

Giant rabbits, live falcons, elaborate sets and durational performances that transform museum spaces and often take place at night outside normal opening hours... If there’s one artist currently subverting the concepts of performance art and the avant-garde, it’s Anne Imhof. Representing Germany at the Biennale, the 38-year-old artist is known for creating visually rich presentations that take the form of strange reveries—intimate yet multilayered studies of movement, gesture and action. One such performance is the Biennale’s Faust.the piece, a five-hour production that also bills itself as a seven-month “scenario” set to play out over the course of the Biennale, is a black metal, goth dance played out in half-time, the performers lunging their bodies atop a glass platform supporting a grid of metal girders. They embrace each other and march in unison; moving in slow motion to a soundtrack of dance music, monastic chanting, barking dogs and screams. It’s a tense performance and, typically of Imhof, it asks for repeated visits to fully absorb the depth of its radicalism. Imhof has only been exhibiting since the beginning of this decade and is essentially a choreographer, but her highly experiential works—which in millennial fashion she encourages viewers to share on Instagram—are some of the most engaging pieces of art today. Her works dissolve the boundaries between actor and audience, and rely on spontaneity. Featuring young performers glued to their phones, and live-texting as a way of sending directives to the cast, they perfectly capture the millennial way of consuming culture.