Anne Imhof, Youth

A group of horses move through freshly fallen snow. They run without destination, gathering and dispersing across an open landscape suspended between wilderness and civilisation. At first the scene appears timeless, almost mythological. The animals seem liberated from history itself. Yet slowly another reality emerges. Towering housing blocks materialise in the distance. Roads, infrastructure and the traces of a social experiment begin to reveal themselves beneath the white surface. What initially appears as freedom is shadowed by something else: absence.

For CIRCA 2023, Anne Imhof presents Youth, a film that arrives carrying the burden of a world transformed. Originally commissioned for presentation at the Garage Museum in Moscow, the work was completed just days before Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine on 24 February 2022. The exhibition was cancelled. The city in which the film was made became inaccessible to the project that had produced it. What remained was a work suspended between two realities: one before war, and one after.

The significance of Youth lies partly within this fracture. The horses were filmed before history shifted. Yet viewed now, it becomes impossible not to read them through the lens of what followed. Their movement across the landscape begins to resemble a search for something beyond borders, beyond ideology, beyond the structures that organise human life. They move collectively but without command. They occupy a world emptied of people, inheriting a terrain shaped by political ambition and historical violence.

The setting is Severnoye Chertanovo, an experimental housing development constructed on the outskirts of Moscow during the late Soviet period. Conceived as a model for a new social future, the district embodied the utopian aspirations of post-Stalinist urban planning. In Imhof’s film these monumental structures remain, but their intended inhabitants have disappeared. The architecture persists as a shell of collective dreams, while the horses wander through it as if through the ruins of an unfinished future.

Throughout her practice, Imhof has explored states of uncertainty, alienation and longing. Her works inhabit the spaces between control and freedom, intimacy and estrangement, power and vulnerability. In Youth, these tensions are distilled into a deceptively simple image. The horses become vessels for projection, carrying centuries of symbolic meaning. They evoke freedom, rebellion, beauty, survival and companionship. Yet they also embody fragility. Their presence feels both triumphant and precarious, as though the world around them could disappear at any moment.

Accompanied by the sacred strains of Johann Sebastian Bach’s St Matthew Passion, the film unfolds with the slow intensity of a ritual. Time appears suspended. Snow absorbs sound and movement. Day gradually yields to darkness. What emerges is not a narrative but a meditation on possibility itself.

The title, Youth, offers no certainty. It functions less as a description than as a question. What does youth mean in an era defined by anxiety, conflict and instability? Is youth a stage of life, a political condition, a form of resistance, or simply the capacity to imagine a future different from the present? Imhof does not attempt to answer. Instead, she leaves the question open.

Presented across CIRCA’s global network of public screens exactly one year after the outbreak of war in Ukraine, Youth becomes both elegy and proposition. It mourns futures interrupted while insisting on the possibility of futures still to come. The horses continue to run. The questions remain unresolved.

Anne Imhof is among the most influential artists working today. Across performance, painting, film, music and installation, she has developed a singular visual language that captures the emotional atmosphere of contemporary life, exploring desire, vulnerability, power and alienation through works that unfold somewhere between choreography, concert, ritual and social encounter.

Often bringing together musicians, performers and long-time collaborators within immersive environments, Imhof creates situations in which tension accumulates slowly and meaning emerges through gesture, movement and presence. Her works are less concerned with narrative than with sensation, producing experiences that feel simultaneously intimate and monumental. This distinctive approach reached international prominence with Faust, awarded the Golden Lion at the 57th Venice Biennale in 2017, and has since been presented at institutions including Tate Modern, Palais de Tokyo, Hamburger Bahnhof and MoMA PS1.

Imhof’s relationship with CIRCA began at a moment of profound global uncertainty. On New Year’s Eve 2020, ONEtransformed Piccadilly Lights into a cinematic meditation on endings and beginnings, broadcast in the final moments before the arrival of 2021 alongside Patti Smith’s midnight performance. She returned the following year with YOUTH, extending her exploration of freedom, longing and collective identity into public space through a month-long commission experienced by audiences across CIRCA’s growing international network. Together, these projects brought Imhof’s distinctive world beyond the museum and gallery, placing it within the rhythms of everyday urban life.

Whether working with a single image, a live body or an entire architectural environment, Imhof continues to create works that capture the psychological conditions of the present moment, revealing both the fragility and intensity of contemporary existence.