Anaïs Horn
Anaïs Horn, born in Graz, Austria, lives and works in Paris and Vienna. In her artistic practice she often interweaves literature/text and photography/video/drawing, exploring moments of intimacy with a special interest in topics such as liminality and coming-of-age.
She observes people and their spaces, gently crossing borders, opening up the private and making intimacy a sensual experience. In the process, she investigates time, memories, transience, the body and its traces, the cautious intrusion of privacy, and the aesthetics of reality and fugacity.
Her images take shape – on different surfaces, haptics and into objects – often assembling into spatial installations, that leave the viewers to resonate freely and to subjectively weave loose threads.
With a background in literature and linguistics and a degree in communication design, she graduated from Friedl Kubelka School for Fine Art Photography in 2014. She has been awarded several scholarships and residencies, e.g. at the Cité Internationale des Arts, Paris (2017–2018 and 2021), Plovdiv, Cultural Capital of Europe 2019, the ISCP New York (2020, 2022) and AiR Trieste, Trieste (2021).
The artist’s book is an important medium for her work: her photo-book Fading was published by DCV, Berlin, in 2021, while Die Hand voller Stunden, so kamst du zu mir accompanied her solo exhibition at Camera Austria, Graz. In 2020 her artist books Je suis malheureuse et heureuse and How do you feel about “Lou”? (in collaboration with Eilert Asmervik) have been published by META / BOOKS, Amsterdam (metabooks.nl). Her book Je suis malheureuse et heureuse was selected for the Photo-Text Book Award at the photo festival Les rencontres d’Arles 2021 and in the official selection of the Oslo Fotobokfestival.
Anaïs Horn dedicates her work to Charlotte of Belgium and Mexico. The educated, beautiful and unusually open-minded Princess of Belgium spent several years in Miramare after her wedding to Maximilian of Austria, before moving to Mexico when he became emperor in 1864 – and when their tragic story started to unfold. She was diagnosed mentally ill at the age of 26 – haunted by paranoia and despair, seemingly due to their hopeless situation and suffering from a lack of physical love and unfulfilled motherhood. After the execution of her husband in 1867 she lived 50 more years in isolation. Horn’s research is based on her letters to Maximilian (“Vor Sehnsucht nach dir vergehend“: the private correspondence between Maximilian of Mexico and his wife Charlotte) – interweaving and juxtaposing text and photography, involving contemporary visual approaches such as spy and surveillance cameras – referring to Charlottes state of mind, her anxieties and depressions. On the other hand Horn is exploring the secret memories of the rooms, the furniture and the objects in the castle of Miramare and the Castelletto, where the young couple used to spend their first years together. The remembrance of the space, haunted emotions – still omnipresent and resonating in the stage-like rooms – and the psychological dimension, the uncanny of the past – and it’s translation into the present – the presence of the absent, inscribed in the space, that might appear as ghostly matter in mirrors, reflections, dead angles and blurs.
Period: May – June 2021
Supported by:
Unstable Intensities: Katharina Copony, Anaïs Horn | MLZ Art Dep + Wiener Art Foundation, Trieste
June 18th – September 10th 2022
Unstable Intensities presents the works realised by independent filmmaker Katharina Copony and visual artist Anaïs Horn as part of the 2021-22 AiR Trieste residency program, supported by the Cultural Department of Land Steiermark (A). Curated by Francesca Lazzarini, the exhibition opens in the spaces of MLZ and Wiener Art Foundation, Trieste, on 18 June at 6.30 pm and will run until
10th September 2022.
Anaïs Horn starts from the Miramare castle in Trieste: her work Longing Ghosts in Deep Blue Paranoia is dedicated to the figure of Charlotte of Belgium, who wanted, built and inhabited the castle in the most intense and complex part of her life.
The mental state of the princess – caused by the violent death of her consort Maximilian of Austria in the context of institutional conflicts in Mexico in the 1860s – and the consequent end of the couple’s ambitious imperial dreams, is evoked by an installation assembling photographs, videos, drawings, found objects, an audio by composer Eliert Asmervik with texts and voice by Estelle Hoy,
and a fragrance created in collaboration with perfume designer Pauline Rochas.
The charm of Miramare complex and the sad story of the princess are fundamental components of a narrative that attracts a constant flow of visitors, tourists and school groups to the city. By focusing on the moment of collapse between fantasy and reality and transforming kitsch – an aesthetic attitude affirmed, in the Habsburg context, from the second half of the 19th century –
from an instrument of manifestation of power to a device of unveiling, Horn’s work delves into this narrative and challenge it from the inside. The mysteries hidden in the folds of the story and in the spaces in which they are usually staged – the architectures of engineer Carl Junker and the park that surrounds them – find in the soft manipulations of Horn a personal and perturbing interpretation which, by transferring them to a different but not alien context – the eclectic building by Giovanni Righetti in via Roma – restore their charm by violating the expectations of the viewer. The hemilich, the domestic secret, turns into its opposite: the unheimlich, the revealing experience of the ghost of memory. On the occasion of the exhibition, the book Anaïs Horn, Longing Ghosts in Deep Blue Paranoia, published by Drama Books, Paris, will be presented. The publication will includes texts by Estelle Hoy, and Francesca Lazzarini and Giulio Polita.