At a crowded Berlin art week Anne Imhof converts Angst into hope

The only detail that didn’t work last Wednesday night at the Hamburger Bahnhof was a sign placed on the welcoming desk stating in capital letters: “Keine foto/No photos”. It didn’t work because everyone with a camera or a smart phone was nonetheless taking pictures of Angst II, the performance piece that Anne Imhof – recipient of the Preis der Nationalgalerie in 2015 – has conceived for the gigantic Berlin’s contemporary art museum. Actually the sign also said: “Enter at your peril! Attention! In the context of the exhibition will be used living, free-flying birds of prey, remote-controlled drones and fog machines. The Hamburger Bahnhof cannot be held responsible for any kind of damage”.

Despite the scary message the crowd filling the empty white room seemed amazed rather than scared, by the living, the fog, the birds and the drone. And when a blurred teenager in shorts walked over the visitors’ heads on the long tightrope across the room nobody seemed worried that she may fall down. Quietness rather than angst was apparently the shared feeling between the beholders.

As pointed out by the flyer available near the sign we mentioned above, Angst II is the second episode of an “exhibition as opera”. We saw the first one last June at the Kunsthalle Basel, during Art Basel, but it was a totally different experience. “Angst I was more intimate, the audience was somehow more involved in the action. Both are those kind of play that you can go on watching for hours and hours” told to CFA Mark Spiegel during the performance. We agree with the Art Basel’s director. While the episode one has a twist of mysterious sexuality, Angst II is somehow more spectacular and monumental. The skinny bored teenagers performing at the Kunsthalle have been given an aura of holiness and power. While in Basel they seemed kind of victims, in Berlin, often standing above the public, they looked like divinities inhabiting a welcoming cathedral (of course that sign is not part of the show). Three self-standing spiral staircases randomly placed at the centre of the former station central nave reminds of medieval pulpits. They also make the lateral corridors look like aisles of a cathedral. A gloomy soundtrack visually linked to an high totem of 40V Marshall amplifiers completes the metaphoric scheme.

While Angst I presented lost teenagers overwhelmed by obscure forces driving them to alienation, boredom, impotence, frustration, Angst II is somehow more positive. Teenagers can walk, see and think above our heads, from a privileged perspective, and it was an extremely teaching symbolic experience, during the performance, to watch the crowd following their quite simple actions, perhaps looking for some enlightenment. Probably someone was also asking himself what would have been the collectable outcome of the performance, and we may argue that in this case the five leather and resin long cylinders hanging from the ceiling are just mute fetish of the event, like in the case of Vanessa Beecroft’s pics of her performances or Matthew Barney’s cabinets. But generally these are exactly the kind of questions teenagers are not interested in.

Angst II is the best thing we have seen up to now at the Berlin contemporary art week. Isabella Bortolozzi and Daniel Buchholz, the dealers representing Anne Imhof, have now a great responsibility toward her talent – Angst’s third episode will be presented in October at the upcoming Biennale de Montréal. On the contrary, the Abc art fair is considerably smaller than last year, and has a reduced international participation. Apparently not many financial resources have been given to the organization, and that could be a bad sign for the near future of this fair. Among the collectors attending yesterday the fair’s opening we met iconic Valeria Napoleone. She recommended the we visit Nina Canell’s exhibition at Barbara Wein that is going to open to the public this evening, along with all the other main galleries in town, from Galerie König to Kraupa-Tuskany Zeidler. And in effect it seems to be the best approach to promote the extraordinary art community of this town: providing international collectors with a pleasant alternative to the ruling model of the art fair. More gallery shows and projects connected by the city’s architecture and existing cultural exhibition spaces, less frustrating galleries’ booths with no space in between them.

February 8, 2019