©NADINE FRACZKOWSKI
It was announced today that the Frankfurt-based artist Anne Imhof will represent Germany at the 2017 Venice Biennale. The news came via a cryptic message on the German Pavilion’s website that recapped some news that was already announced, that Susanne Pfeffer, the director of the Museum Fridericianum in Kassel, will oversee the pavilion.
Over the past few years, Imhof’s work has been steadily popping up in biennials around the world, and making appearances at European and American galleries. Her performances typically look at the body and its relationship to larger systems. SOTSB for DEAL (2015), which was performed at MoMA PS1 in New York, was about the nature of deals and the way they shape bodily movements. In the process, Imhof explores how personalities get expressed when bodies are co-opted.
It remains unclear what Imhof, who won the Hamburger Banhof’s Preis der Nationalgalerie in 2015, will produce for the 2017 Venice Biennale, though a release suggests that it will also be a performance and perhaps a set of paintings. For now, Imhof’s work can be seen at the Montreal Biennale, where she is currently staging Angst III, which the artist conceived as the third act of an opera.