Anne Imhof, One

To mark this moment, CIRCA presents a new commission by Anne Imhof, one of the defining artistic voices of her generation. Awarded the Golden Lion at the 57th Venice Biennale in 2017 for Faust, Imhof has spent the past decade developing a distinctive practice that brings together performance, music, film, painting and choreography into works that examine power, desire, vulnerability and collective identity. Her works rarely offer direct political statements. Instead, they construct emotional and psychological landscapes through which broader historical conditions can be experienced, felt and negotiated.

Filmed between the beaches of Normandy and the Tanks at Tate Modern, ONE unfolds through a sequence of images that resist singular interpretation. Against the vast horizon of the English Channel, Eliza Douglas repeatedly strikes the sea with a whip. The gesture appears simultaneously futile and determined, absurd and ceremonial. Normandy itself occupies a singular position within the European imagination. A coastline shaped by centuries of exchange, conflict, migration and war, it remains one of the places through which Europe has repeatedly imagined and reimagined itself. On the final evening before Britain formally leaves the European project, the image acquires an almost mythological dimension, though one that remains deliberately unresolved.

The commission is accompanied by In Dark Times, a composition by Anne Imhof, Eliza Douglas and Billy Bultheel whose title is drawn from Bertolt Brecht’s poem written in exile in 1939:

“In the dark times
Will there also be singing?
Yes, there will also be singing
About the dark times.”

Brecht’s lines emerge at another moment when Europe stands on the edge of profound transformation. Their inclusion here is significant. They do not promise redemption, nor do they surrender to despair. Instead, they insist upon the continuing necessity of artistic expression within periods of instability. Art does not stand outside history. It moves through it.

As midnight approaches, the work shifts from the open horizon of Normandy to footage filmed during Imhof’s landmark Sex project at Tate Modern. Here Douglas appears carrying burning roses. Few symbols possess such a dense and contradictory history. Across European painting, literature and religious iconography, the rose has signified beauty, devotion, desire, martyrdom and mortality. In medieval Christianity the flower frequently appeared in depictions of paradise, while in secular traditions it became inseparable from romantic longing. Within Britain, the Tudor rose evolved into a symbol of political union following the Wars of the Roses, its intertwined petals representing the reconciliation of opposing dynasties. Imhof allows these associations to remain suspended within the image. Consumed by fire yet not destroyed, the roses become symbols of both love and loss, continuity and transformation, carrying histories that exceed any single reading.

These images also resonate with recurring themes throughout Imhof’s practice. Her performances frequently occupy states of suspension, positioning bodies between action and inertia, intimacy and alienation, resistance and surrender. Long recognised for constructing tableaux that unfold somewhere between theatre, ritual and social encounter, she approaches the moving image less as narrative than as a form of painting in time. Individual gestures accumulate symbolic weight while refusing definitive interpretation. Meaning remains mobile, contingent and unstable.

Presented in the closing moments of CIRCA’s inaugural year, ONE functions less as a statement about a specific event than as a meditation on historical passage itself. The work does not seek to explain the uncertainties of the present, nor predict what lies ahead. Instead, it dwells within the threshold between endings and beginnings, reminding us that periods of transformation are rarely experienced as clarity. More often they arrive as images, fragments, emotions and symbols whose significance only becomes visible with time.