The esteemed German artist Anne Imhof will present her largest performance work to date at New York’s Park Avenue Armory this March. Titled “DOOM: HOUSE OF HOPE” and curated by Klaus Biesenbach, the performances are scheduled to run from March 3rd to 12th in the Armory’s Wade Thompson Drill Hall.
“DOOM: HOUSE OF HOPE” is expected to leverage “the scale of the Drill Hall to create an immersive, alternate universe,” according to Pierre Audi, the Park Avenue Armory’s Anita K. Hersh artistic director. Each three-hour performance will feature an ensemble of nearly 60 New York–based dancers, artists, musicians, and performers. Among the performers are members of the Flexn and Line Dance communities.
The performance promises to be a reflective mirror of our current societal conditions. Performers will engage with audience members in a shared space while exploring themes of community, hope, anxiety, and activism.
“‘DOOM’ is my love letter to New York, a city that is very close to my heart and has inspired me for many years,” said Imhof. “For this show, I feel honored to work with a diverse subset of the city’s artistic community. Another major inspiration for the performance is the immensity of the Drill Hall, which has both shaped the work and enabled me to make a piece that is bigger and more complex than anything I’ve done before. The work is not complete until the audience is present, and I look forward to experiencing the energy that New York will bring to it.”
Following her solo exhibition at Sprüth Magers Los Angeles in 2023, “DOOM” marks Imhof’s most significant project in the United States to date. Imhoof is most known for her exhibition and performance “Faust” at the German Pavilion during the Venice Biennale in 2017, where she received the Golden Lion for the pavilion. Over the last decade, the Berlin- and Los Angeles–based artist has presented major institutional solo exhibitions at Kunsthaus Bregenz in 2024, the Palais de Tokyo in 2021, Tate Modern in 2019, and MoMA PS1 in 2015, among others.
“Anne Imhof has shown herself as one of the most seismographically astute and inventive artists of our time,” said Biesenbach. “She possesses a perceptive and, at the same time, transformative quality to move bodies, images, and sounds through the exhibition space that creates strong resonances in the audiences and performers alike—and she plans to share this exploratory approach in New York through a special journey this March at the Armory.”
