Roni Horn - Cabinet Of / AKA / Index Cixous [2003-05] - 2003-2010

Cabinet Of (2003)
The modalities of appearance mark Roni Horn's series of 36 head shots of a clown. Originally seen in her Clowd and Cloun installation, a series of alternating images on the two motifs of the cloud and the clown, Horn's stunning photographs of the inevitable clown (he always looks the same) disintegrate the very consistency that makes a clown recognizable as a clown. The clown is a constant, a symbolic form whose identity is rooted in a conventionally defined appearance (red bulbous nose, a shock of bright frizzy hair, white pancake skin, an ear-to-ear grin), one that occludes the specifics of the persona-the player-who temporarily assumes that guise. Cabinet of repeats 36 times the dissolution of the clown's appearance and thus, perhaps, the defining features of the clown itself.

AKA (2010)
Roni Horn’s ‘aka’ presents thirty images of the American artist throughout her life, shown as nonlinear pairs that move back and forth in time. Introduced by Dave Hickey in an essay titled ‘In This Light She Resembles Herself,’ the art critic describes Horn’s ‘aka’ as a ‘volume of non-chronological photographs of the artist from infancy to adulthood, an exercise in Foucault’s lost art of resemblance. In ‘aka’ Horn manipulates “portraits of the artist” seen in rigorously cropped glimpses through the medium of time, as if through water, breathing herself in and out as we do oxygen.’ This volume was published in 2010 for an exhibition of Horn’s work at Hauser & Wirth New York.

Index Cixous [2003-05]
Inspired by the philosopher and writer Hélène Cixous, which whom the photographer and artist Roni Horn has collaborated before, Index Cixous questions the nature of language in its most fundamental sense and proposes a version-one without words, but which can be read as any other. Both Horn and Cixous are concerned with communication wrought out of material space. Cixous writes about women’s language arising from the female body, and she argues for a new language, one not in thrall to patriarchy but that acknowledges the life-giving force and history of the feminine.