Marianna Simnett is a multimedia artist living and working between Berlin and New York City. Simnett uses vivid and visceral means to explore the body as a site of transformation, through film, performance, sculpture, music and painting. Her immersive narratives center around the overlapping and at times incongruous themes of vulnerability, autonomy, control, pain, metamorphosis, and care. Simnett’s animal and human protagonists, often performed by herself, are always “becoming something other than themselves”. Her cavalier approach to the undoing and redoing of identity is explored through uncanny, arresting images which plumb the depths of some of the darkest, most fundamental aspects of being human.

In 2024, Simnett presented WINNER, a major film installation currently showing at Hamburger Bahnhof, Berlin; in 2023 she composed and directed her debut stage performance GORGON; in 2022, Simnett presented new work at the 59th Venice Biennale: The Milk of Dreams, Castello di Rivoli, Turin, and OGRESS at Société, Berlin. Simnett has exhibited in prestigious institutionsm internationally, including Julia Stoschek Foundation, Berlin (2021); the Institute of Modern Art, Brisbane (2020); Kunsthalle Zürich (2019); the Frans Hals Museum, Haarlem (2019); Copenhagen Contemporary (2018); the New Museum, New York (2018); and the Museum für Moderne Kunst, Frankfurt (2018).

HOW IS YOUR WORK INFLUENCED BY THE CIRCA 2024 MANIFESTO?
In Red Card, a female football referee vehemently holds up a red card against a black sky. A group of Machiavellian football players, performed by professional dancers, refute the referee’s command. The red card, a symbol of authority, power, and the right to vote, speaks to a desire to break free from a regimented system that maintains the rules of the game, and to find slipstreams of liberation. Both the football players and referee subvert traditional roles: the latter often typecast as male and decisive; the former, converting violent impact into fluid movement, questioning the figurehead who calls ‘right’ from ‘wrong’, transforming the fight into flight. The film ends with an impressive leap, seemingly about to attack, but instead traveling over opposition and toward an unknowable void.

WHAT WOULD YOU CREATE/DO WITH THE £30K CIRCA PRIZE?
I would use the prize money to develop a film which looks at contemporary reproduction and motherhood through the lens of Lamia (demon who devoured children). I have spent the past few years reclaiming myths of female demons (Athena, Gorgon) and linking them to technology and tool-building, using a combination of dance, performance, music and machine-learning. Childlessness confronts myself and my peers daily – in the news, political campaigns and amongst my community. I wish to create a film which deconstructs the debilitating myths of motherhood and repositions Lamia and non-conformist women in a less demonizing light. The money would be an enormous gift, granting me the possibility to develop, shoot and edit the film, and tell a story which offers a new perspective, bringing the ancient and modern into a dialogue which I hope would be moving to many.

FOLLOW MARIANNA SIMNETT ON INSTAGRAM