This story appears in i-D 374, The Unknown Issue.
written by Paige k. Bradley
photography Ari Marcopoulos
styling Clare Byrne
Anne Imhof is extremely serious. “It wasn’t ‘in vogue’ to be serious, so I took that risk in my work,” she explains, comfortably reclining into a brown leather sofa, but alert.
For many, a woman who takes herself seriously can be their worst nightmare. Me? I love to see it—especially when that seriousness manifests as steely determination, channelled into collaborative projects with everyone from fashion designers to dancers and musicians. (Any assumptions of egomaniacal self-seriousness: quashed.)
Imhof captured the art world’s attention relatively late, but behind the scenes, the German-born 47-year-old has been an electrifying force for decades, with a network of prolific friends across art, fashion, music, and dance. That’s evident in her multidisciplinary, collaborative projects. Her name is the one on the tin, as it were, but it takes a village of stomping, scowling co-conspirators. It was them, screaming amid barking Doberman dogs, and a wall of noise reverberating from transparent plexiglass guitars, that catapulted her into artworld infamy with Faust, the Golden Lion–winning performance at 2017’s Venice Biennale.
“It’s very romantic, hopeful and hellish.”
Anne imhof
Designed to be a five-hour production across seven months, the operatic piece combining performance, painting, and sculpture with a steel and safety glass architecture seemed utterly divisive. Everyone was talking about it, and if you weren’t there you felt you had seriously missed out. Named after a figure who makes a deal with the devil in German literature, it’s a story that has been adapted and referenced many times over, most notably in Johann Wolfgang von Goethe’s 19th-century tragic drama. In Imhof’s hands it became a glacial, severe, and mysterious ritual featuring androgynous streetwear-clad dancers serving brutal facial expressions and shapes. (“Faust” in German also means fist.)
In 2019, Imhof staged SEX in the gloomy tanks of London’s Tate Modern—a three-hour-plus ensemble piece that was a thrash of bullwhips with the feel of an underground sex club–meets–medieval mosh pit. Like Faust, it had a relentlessly foreboding soundtrack that was subsequently released as an LP. In the years that followed, she became the poster woman for a hardened, brutalist aesthetic, landing her the cover of a David Velasco–era Artforum issue dubbed the “Year in Hell” (2021? How true). So, what’s downstream from dark, brooding Sex-y hell?
DOOM is the title of Imhof’s new commission for the truly enormous Wade Thompson Drill Hall in the Park Avenue Armory in New York. If that’s a hard sell, the work is also subtitled House of Hope, because, for Imhof, her biggest performance to date is about “the beauty and ugliness of melting into each other,” she explains. “It’s very romantic, hopeful, and hellish.”
Though most narratives are implicit when it comes to an Imhof performance (it’s all in the borrowed signage and loaded stares), the story of DOOM centers around the question of what Romeo and Juliet got up to after consigning their love to a pile of ashes. Perhaps it’s as Romeo lamented: “There is no world for me outside Verona’s walls, except for the worlds of purgatory, torture, and hell itself.” Or in line with Prince Escalus, the middleman between the couple’s warring families, declaring, “All are punished.”
It’s been more than 400 years since Shakespeare brought her to life, but resurrecting Juliet is timely. The 2019 British musical & Juliet—which winsomely dares to ask what would have happened “if Juliet didn’t end it all over Romeo?”—is in its third year on Broadway. Kit Connor and Rachel Zegler recently starred in what I’ve heard was the production of the classic for Gen Z, with songs by geriatric Millennial par excellence Jack Antonoff. DOOM will see the role of Juliet cast across multiple performers, mostly female. This approach has precedent in Imhof’s work. For her 2023 project EMO, a ghoulish arcade of clown portraits amidst industrial water tanks (an exhibition with additional dance work staged at her gallery Sprüth Magers in Los Angeles), the role of the clown was about “how everyone could be the jester.”
This time, Imhof is queering line dancing and cheerleading, collaborating with dancers from the American Ballet Theatre, including one of its principals, Devon Teuscher, whose favourite ballet is Romeo and Juliet and who has danced as Juliet many times. Daniil Simkin, a former principal at the American Ballet Theatre and Berlin State Ballet, will also be in the mix. While Imhof explains the third act of DOOM will focus on ballet, the whole piece is concerned with “making ballet sequences very visible, bringing the ballerina closer to the audience and taking her off the pedestal.”
Imhof generally doesn’t place any barriers between her performers and their audience (maintaining eye contact as a performer screams in your face is more or less guaranteed in her work). “What is new for me is working with dancers who are used to working on a stage where there is a fourth wall,” she says of DOOM. “Their craft allows for a composition that hasn’t happened before [in my work]. There’s a common desire in creating this framework for themselves to perform as people.”
“I won’t perform and I won’t make it easy for us.”
Anne Imhof
With their skate-ramp-casual dress code, there’s generally much ado about the relative youth of people Imhof works with (including much marvelling and head-shaking about the vaping and phone-checking dancers do, even though the latter is often because stage directions are being sent to performers in real time via text message). But the people who constitute an Anne Imhof work are seasoned pros.
Among her chief collaborators is the head choreographer for DOOM, 38-year-old Josh Johnson, who came up as a dancer in the Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater, and spent time in American choreographer William Forsythe’s company in Frankfurt, where Imhof studied at the Städelschule. He’s also been affiliated with the Schauspielhaus Zürich, one of the most revered theatres in the German-speaking world.
The visual motifs of her work—lissome bodies clad in Nike, Adidas, or Demna’s Balenciaga—skew the perception of it tackling youthful themes (like alienation and angst), but those themes are rooted in older traditions. Jeppe Ugelvig, editor-in-chief of the arts title Viscose Journal, tells me that “even 10 years before Venice, she was doing performances on tables in bars in the Marais, with five people watching. Her work is hyper-mediated and capitalised upon [now], but it originates in pre-social media spaces. The Rhineland, if you can call that the underground.” She “was always at the party, but decided to make art about presence,” so her work functions at the intersection of two different economies: the IRL-cultivated Gen X sense of cool, and speedy, post-Millennial virality.
Imhof notes DOOM will feature a lot of autotune, working with Ville Haimala, the Berlin-based artist and composer of the genre-defying duo Amnesia Scanner, before rattling off a list of other musical touchstones for the show: slowed-down pieces by classical composers Bach and Mahler, and contributions from Arca and a young Berlin rapper. Wagner’s 1859 magnum opus, Tristan und Isolde, closes with the “Liebestod” aria, a piece of music that is the quintessential accompaniment to young, tragic love. To wit: It played out the last scene of Baz Luhrmann’s 1996 Romeo + Juliet.
Months before we speak, I was thinking about Wagner’s “Liebestod” and romanticism —mainly, wherefore art thou’s relevance today? The theme seems central to Imhof’s work, in light of the tense and pervasive sense of, well, doom in her performances, along with the fact that one of her longest-running collaborators is with artist/musician/model Eliza Douglas, with whom she has a close, and at times romantic, relationship. (Douglas will be responsible for DOOM’s costumes.) “Serious” has a loose affiliation with rationality, while unbridled passion, hysteria, and histrionics have historically been associated with women. Romance and the romantic (to say nothing of sex) is a sower of chaos—a threat to order.
Imhof muses that, today, one of the easiest tactics “to deal with something difficult is to make a joke about it.” From memecoins to the New York City Police staging a perp walk for Luigi Mangione as hysterical overcompensation for its inability to find him in the first place, absurdity is now the norm. Is laughter a release? What if it’s a dismissal—a refusal to engage? The earnest unruliness of Imhof’s work could be summed up by a line from DOOM: “I won’t perform, and I won’t make it easy for us.” (Serious, remember?) You might even call it romantic.
hair Dylan Chavles using Oribe at MA + Group
makeup Janessa Paré using Armani Beauty at Streeters
set design Ian Salter at Frank Reps
styling assistant Sofia Amaral
hair assistant Olivia MairÉad
production The Morrison Group
production manager Vince Barrucco
location The 1896