Birke Gorm & Anaïs Horn: BLOOMING SIMULACRA

Anaïs Horn, born in Graz (AT), lives and works in Paris (FR).
With a background in literature and communication design, she graduated from the Friedl Kubelka School of Artistic Photography in Vienna in 2015. She has received numerous grants and residencies, including at the Cité Internationale des Arts, Paris (2017- 2018 and 2021) or at the ISCP New York City (2020, 2022).
Her artistic practice often interweaves literature/text and photography/video/drawing/painting, exploring moments of intimacy with a particular interest in themes such as liminality and coming-of-age. She observes people and their spaces, gently crossing boundaries, opening up the private and making intimacy a sensual experience. In doing so, she explores time, memories, transience, the body and its traces, the careful invasion of privacy, and the aesthetics of reality and fleetingness. Her images take shape - on various surfaces and in objects - and often come together to form expansive installations.
The artist's book is an important medium for her work: in 2021 her photo book Fading was published by DCV, Berlin, as well as Die Hand voller Stunden, so kamst du zu mir, which accompanied her solo showat 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) by META/BOOKS, Amsterdam (metabooks.nl). Her book Je suis malheureuse et heureuse was shortlisted 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: Blooming Simulacra
Project description
A glow of light on the drapery, the blossoms sinking into darkness, is it evening light streaming through a delicate curtain, or is it the last flicker of a candle that illuminates this picture? How still are the objects in this still life, how dead is nature in this Nature Morte? Radical thinking (Baudrillard) draws its power - similar to the real image that makes us aware of "this trembling of the world" - from the rejection of reality. Instead of creating transparency, the secret is reintroduced: Working out the illusion, creating it. Making mysterious what is clear, incomprehensible what is comprehensible... returning the world as we got it, incomprehensible. For "Blooming Simulacra" Horn stages living still lifes in the Graz Art Garden. A moment of emergence is depicted photographically, a moment in the course of passing, in circulation - a nocturnal illusion - made visible as it can never be visible. After this moment of appropriation, the living images are returned to nature and transform: what remains as a witness is the one image, the punctum. These pictures are presented in the exhibition - but also the living still lifes made of stretcher frames, fabrics and plants, which have then been left to the course of nature for several weeks and have changed, at every time of day and night, at every moment, will never look the same again. The secret of the individual painting remains hidden forever.