Sep 6

Sep 6 Anne Imhof

With her 5-hour performance piece Faust at the German pavilion of the previous Venice Biennale, Anne Imhof shook the grounds of many. An array of androgynous bodies, existing timelessly inside a confined space; in parts its anatomy resembles that of a cage, guarded by dobermans that implement both fear and protection within the audience and the performers themselves.

In all of this, there’s life and death—their in-between. Imhof’s choreography is a brutal homage to the contemporary matters of society. How a increasingly growing technology has softly sedated us into vessels of capitalism.

We’re here, but we’re anywhere. How we are a biography of waiting, and how individuality has become a landscape of consumable images. How we are an innate absence of presence, memory living for the past and future, especially the future.

The staged moments of Faust are an exaggeration of time in which the destination of humanity, its pathos, is mirrored in its insatiable drifting. A silent violence, everywhere, the tangible powerlessness making it terrible and beautiful all at once.