RONI HORN
On view through 13.06.2010
Curator: Milada Ślizińska
Gallery 2
The mutable version of identity is not an aberration . . . the fixed version is the aberration, said Roni Horn in one of her interviews.1 Examining her work, one may argue that the thirty years of Roni Horn's artistic effort are a study in the mutability of the I, a consistent and beautiful search for identity in the plurality of its aspects and artistic forms.
Horn works in a variety of media, such as sculpture, photography, installation, drawing and books. The artist does not give preference to any of the media, therefore her works are not easily assignable to a single category. She uses her materials with great sensitivity and there is an unwavering intensity in her ability to reconcile materials with personal experience. In a time of isolation and fragmentation, Horn's singular and unrelenting focus on an object or an image demands much from viewers, but her work offers ample rewards to those willing to take the time to become part of it. The concentrated visual power creates a solid ground for her exploration of difficult topics, such as gender, the relation between subject and object, subjectivity, and above all, identity: from sexual to gender identity, androgyny and the related category of doubling. The authors of the introduction to the Whitey Museum catalog2 observe that
(...) it was apparent early on that Horn was addressing matters that had not explicitly concerned Minimalist and Post-Minimalist sculptors before her—identity and location, experience and memory, sensuality and sexuality. Building upon the structures of Minimalism Horn approached art in a new way and was open to metaphor and allusion, which is reflected in her view of Asphere as a self-portrait. In 1990, Felix Gonzalez-Torres wrote a seminal and moving essay about her work and he chided anyone who would "dismiss Roni's work as pure formalism". Although Horn's work had never been directly associated with the identity politics of the 1980s, it was evident that these ideas were still of consequence nearly a decade later since the "act of looking at an object, any object, is transfigured by gender race, socio-economic class, and sexual orientation".3
Nature plays an important part in Horn's work, and there is nothing sentimental about this statement. In 1975 the artist goes to Iceland, where she begins photographing the glaciers, lava, glacial rivers, earth. One of her best known and most widely recognized works is You are the Weather (1994-1995), which shows the face of a woman immersed in Iceland's hot pools in changing climactic conditions. Another important and frequent reference and inspiration is Emily Dickinson, whose poetry explores the ambiguities of language. Dickinson uses apparently light, innocent forms to probe difficult problems, pose questions without giving answers, leaving the reader with a feeling of uncertainty and surprise. Similarly, we admire Horn's works and draw pleasure from their visual beauty, but on the other hand we feel that beyond the visual there exists a deeper and more complex message; they inspire reflection, force us to pause. The ambiguity of Horn's language or message has one of its sources in écriture féminine, and more specifically in the writing of Hélène Cixous, who addresses the problem of gender difference in her famous The Laugh of the Medusa. The artist's preoccupation with identity or the duality of human nature is also crucial for the understanding of her series of portraits which will be presented at CSW Zamek Ujazdowski.
Roni Horn was born in New York in 1955. She received her degrees from Rhode Island School of Design and Yale University. She is a recipient of many prestigious awards, such as the CalArts/Alper Award and the Guggenheim fellowship. She has had exhibitions in the most important cultural institutions around the world, such as the Art Institute of Chicago, Centre Georges Pompidou in Paris, and recently in Tate Modern in London and the Whitney Museum in New York.
The exhibition of Roni Horn's work in CSW Zamek Ujazdowski includes the following photographic cycles: You are the Weather (1994/1995), Cabinet of (2001), Bird (2008) and a.k.a (2008/2009).
