MILAN – For over 30 years, Roni Horn has experimented with a variety of media, ranging from photography to design, installations to performance and art books, while concentrating on the themes of change, perception and memory. Today, for the first time in Milan, she is bringing a new series of photographs entitled Water Teller, through which she tells us how water can change the features of a face while preserving its identity.
The show
Horn’s research deals with questions like the mutability of nature and the identity of Man and encourages reflection on the deep relationship between the emotions of a subject and the surrounding landscape. The transformations and instability of the real have a central role in the artist’s practice, to the extent that her works are often presented in pairs or a series of similar elements, to reveal almost imperceptible differences. Water Teller is made up of eight diptychs. Each diptych includes four images of the face of the photographer Juergen Teller. None of the four faces, however, is the original image of the subject, but rather its reflection in water. Despite the fact the images are almost identical, each preserves its own identity.
Water installations
Water has always been an important element recurring in the various works of Roni Horn. The artist has executed various public works, e.g. “You are the Weather” – Munich (1996-97), a permanent installation created for the scientific research organisation Deutscher Wetterdienst, based in Munich. “Some Thames” (2000), however, is a permanent installation at the University of Akureyri in Iceland, composed of 80 photographs dominated by the water distributed across the communal spaces of the university; a symbol of the ebb and flow of students and of the continuous learning which plays the leading role within the University.
by editorial staff
