The jury of the 57th International Art Exhibition – La Biennale di Venezia has awarded the German artist Anne Imhof the Golden Lion prize for best national pavilion. According to the jury, the installation / performance “Faust” is …a powerful and disturbing installation that poses urgent questions about our time” the jury said. Anne Imhof also won the 2017 Absolut Art Award.
The press text says about the exhibition: “In a society that conceives guilt not in religious terms but as a matter of individual responsibility, that considers ill health not as divine punishment but as a personal failure, the body becomes capital and money the measure of all things. The body is a consumer item, handed over to the vagaries of the free market. Market rationality decides whether a body is worthy of protection — or whether it falls within the remit of a necropolitics. Capitalism brings the reign of money to its highest stage. Like in Goethe’s play Faust, we trade something that does not exist. The soul does not exist, the products of the financial sector do not exist and yet — or because of all this the system functions. Only by forming an association of bodies, only by occupying space can resistance take hold. On the balustrades and fences, underground and on the roof, the performers conquer and occupy the room, the house, the pavilion, the institution, the state.”
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