July 2024
Roni Horn, Subject of Solo Exhibition The Detour of Identity at Louisiana Museum of Modern Art, Humlebæk, Denmark
American contemporary artist Roni Horn’s solo exhibition The Detour of Identity is currently on view at Louisiana Museum of Modern Art in Humlebæk, Denmark. Marking her first major solo presentation in the Nordics, the exhibition embodies her new approaches to photography, drawing and sculpture through the prism of cinema. The exhibition shows Horn’s intense occupation with body, desire and sexuality that are not often captured by words, literature or language, and her fascination with the methodologies of cinema that reveal human psychology and desire, submerged deep within the human psyche. More than any other medium, cinematic art reveals the mechanisms of psychic life through techniques such as dramatic contrast of light and dark, repetition of identical and near-identical images, camera angles, cutting and splicing, flashbacks and distortions.
In the exhibition, Horn’s works are juxtaposed with excerpts from iconic films by master directors including Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho and Vertigo, Ingmar Bergman’s Persona, Claude Chabrol’s The Does or Lars Von Trier’s Melancholia, which all delicately explore the unease and ambiguity of identity that cannot be fully expressed through language. Horn captures the tension between the external world, in which the self exists within societal boundaries, and the internal world dominated by impulse and desire.
Pursuing fundamental questions such as “Who am I? What does my gender mean? What language is available for emotions?”, the works of the exhibition essentially revolve around societal identity and the experimentation, loss, confusion of identity itself. Thus, by emphasizing the fluidity of identity that cannot be captured or defined by a certain shape or form, Horn expands her previous work through the medium of cinematic art.
Daylight—natural light—is a key part of this exhibition, creating an interplay between the indoor light and outdoor weather. Movements of light under transforming weather provide an opportunity to tangibly experience the conceptual aspects of Horn’s work—humans and the natural landscape, permanence and variability, the ambiguity and transparence of light, water, or weather. The exhibition runs through September 1.
In the exhibition, Horn’s works are juxtaposed with excerpts from iconic films by master directors including Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho and Vertigo, Ingmar Bergman’s Persona, Claude Chabrol’s The Does or Lars Von Trier’s Melancholia, which all delicately explore the unease and ambiguity of identity that cannot be fully expressed through language. Horn captures the tension between the external world, in which the self exists within societal boundaries, and the internal world dominated by impulse and desire.
Pursuing fundamental questions such as “Who am I? What does my gender mean? What language is available for emotions?”, the works of the exhibition essentially revolve around societal identity and the experimentation, loss, confusion of identity itself. Thus, by emphasizing the fluidity of identity that cannot be captured or defined by a certain shape or form, Horn expands her previous work through the medium of cinematic art.
Daylight—natural light—is a key part of this exhibition, creating an interplay between the indoor light and outdoor weather. Movements of light under transforming weather provide an opportunity to tangibly experience the conceptual aspects of Horn’s work—humans and the natural landscape, permanence and variability, the ambiguity and transparence of light, water, or weather. The exhibition runs through September 1.
