The Detour of Identity

An overarching theme throughout Roni Horn’s diverse practice of photography, sculpture, drawings and books is without doubt identity—of the self and others—as seen through gender, the body, experience, time and the landscape. The Detour of Identity, conceived by Jerry Gorovoy, curator of a major exhibition of the same name at the Louisiana Museum of Art, Humlebæk, Denmark, creates a dialogue between great movie classics and Horn’s work to consider the shifting facets of identity. Stills and dialogue from films inspirational to Horn, from Carl Theodor Dreyer’s The Passion of Joan of Arc to Alfred Hitchcock’s Vertigo and Ingmar Bergman’s Persona, appear alongside her work to reveal a wealth of connections—how Horn uses cinematic approaches like cutting and splicing in her drawings, and close-ups in her photographs; or how the play of mirrors and the duality of characters (lost, mistaken, stolen identities) in films reflect the visual pairings of her art and conceptual pairings such as place/displacement, sameness/difference, desire/fear. Fascinatingly, Horn herself does not make films. Rather, it is the transformation of filmic structures and sensibilities within her vision that makes the artist’s exploration of identity even more paradoxical, complex and compelling. Co-published with the Louisiana Museum of Modern Art, Humlebæk