On March 3, Anne Imhof’s epic performance-art spectacle “Doom: House of Hope” opened at New York’s Park Avenue Armory. To celebrate the sprawling, three-hour work, which runs through March 12, Artforum revisits its “Openings” feature on the artist, written by editor and art historian Victoria Camblin and published in the magazine’s October 2013 issue.
 
In this early assessment of Imhof’s practice—published four years before the career-defining premiere of Faust in Venice in 2017—Camblin examines Imhof’s first institutional solo show: “Parade” at Frankfurt’s Portikus. “Deploying a variety of media—including video, sound, installation, works on paper, and sculpture . . . ‘Parade’ successfully undermined the linear, cause/effect trajectory between the performative act and its archiving: Execution, conception, and documentation were collapsed and then restacked,” writes Camblin.
 
“Imhof’s repetition is relentless yet evolving, approaching a point of excess well suited to the context of the club scene: [The performance] Aqua Leo not only shines a strobe onto a social model, it mirrors the pulse of an electronic beat.”
—The editors

“In this Artforum Dossier, we have gathered texts that focus on artistic practices that reflexively engage with the specific materiality of celluloid—the transparent plastic that served as the most common substrate for moving images before the advent of analog and digital video. These practices typically focus less on storytelling than on the aesthetic possibilities of directly manipulating celluloid film stock, creating sequences of celluloid film frames, or running celluloid film strips through projectors. The results usually emphasize our perceptual experience of light, color, sound, pattern, movement, and space—that is, those elements that provide the language of all moving-image experiences.”
—Tina Rivers Ryan