Rebecca Horn / Liliane Lijn: Arise Alive

In the wake of Meredith Monk and Pan Daijing’s recent solo exhibitions, Haus der Kunst’s commitment to liveness in a growing digital world continues. Both Liliane Lijn and Rebecca Horn are visionary women artists who orchestrate the interplay of bodies, machines, moving images, sound, and light in new, unique, and diverse languages ahead of their time. Be it through the display of moving installations, motored objects, or human and non-human bodies, Haus der Kunst is a special stage for new, unexpected, and groundbreaking choreographies, and its ongoing transformation into a new living organism persists.

Rebecca Horn
“It is movement that inspires me. […] We pulsate—and if we concentrate, we can also change great things in our bodies.” —Rebecca Horn

Spanning six decades, the transdisciplinary work of Rebecca Horn (born 1944, Germany) deals with the theme of existence and the blurring of boundaries between nature and culture, technology and biological capital, and the human and the non-human. Whether one describes the artist as an inventor, director, author, composer, or poet, she sees herself first and foremost as a choreographer. Horn describes her artistic practice as carefully calculated relationships of space, light, physicality, sound, and rhythm that come together to form an orchestration. In her performative, sculptural, and film works, the acts of becoming a machine, becoming an animal, or becoming the Earth present life as a visible, tangible, and audible existence that can be experienced through the body.

The exhibition Rebecca Horn focuses on performativity, from the artist’s earliest works to her most recent productions. From the performances and films of the 1970s to the mechanical sculptures of the 1980s and the spatial installations of the 1990s to the present, Horn creates physical connections through the idea of incorporation. She uses the symbolic power of movement from the language of dance as a medium and catalyst for her choreographic fictions. Virtuously interwoven references to literature, art history, and film run throughout her body of work. Horn’s practice is a lifelong and topical exploration in the decentralisation of humanity.

Curated by Jana Baumann with Radia Soukni. 

Funded by the Kulturstiftung des Bundes (German Federal Cultural Foundation). Funded by the Beauftragte der Bundesregierung für Kultur und Medien (Federal Government Commissioner for Culture and the Media).

The catalogue will be published by Spector Books in July, 2024.

Liliane Lijn: Arise Alive
“My work is an exercise in seeing the world … I want to feel alive in my work. I want it to breathe. I want its surface to be as skin, translucent, porous, emitting the fine moist heat of the living.” —Liliane Lijn

Arise Alive is Liliane Lijn’s (born 1939, New York) first institutional solo exhibition of this scale. It surveys her work from the late 1950s to today, with a focus on the 1970s to 1980s. Throughout her six-decade career, Lijn has continued to focus on the intersection of art, literature, and scientific thought. Her multifaceted practice, which spans sculptures, installations, collages, paintings, videos, and performances, interwines kinetic art, surrealism, ancient mythology, eastern philosophy, scientific innovation, and feminist thought.

Before settling in London in 1966, Lijn lived in Paris and Athens, where she was among a group of artists and poet friends defining the Kinetic Art Movement—one connected to space technology and cosmic spirituality. During this period, Lijn became one of the first women artists to experiment with kinetic sculpture and electric motors, which sparked a lifelong commitment to the understanding of energy.

Throughout her career, she has experimented with the immaterial within the material and considered how to visualise the invisible, exploring the visualisation of electronic waves, forces, vibration, light, and sound. As she has explained, her wish is to “see the world in terms of light and energy.” The materials she uses—unconventional and often industrial, such as plastics, prisms, and copper wire—are often intrinsic to the ideas she explores, becoming the source in which she can experiment with reflection, movement, and light.

Curated by Emma Enderby with Teresa Retzer.

Arise Alive is organised by Haus der Kunst München and mumok—Museum moderner Kunst Stiftung Ludwig Wien, in collaboration with Tate St Ives. At mumok, the exhibition will be curated by Manuela Ammer, who co-conceived the exhibition, and be presented from November 15, 2024 until May 4, 2025. In conjunction with the exhibition, a monograph on Liliane Lijn will be co-published.

For their annual support of the programme Haus der Kunst thanks its shareholders, the Free State of Bavaria and the Gesellschaft der Freunde Haus der Kunst e.V. Haus der Kunst further thanks its major supporter, the Alexander Tutsek-Stiftung for their generous commitment to its work, as well as Ulli and Uwe Kai-Stiftung.