Anne Imhof’s scenography for her much-anticipated Park Avenue Armory fee, DOOM: Home of Hope (2025), is American to the max. Inside a semi-dark Wade Thompson Drill Corridor, viewers are confronted with rows of gleaming black Cadillac Escalades. The immense corridor, made to resemble a highschool health club, options black obstacles that cordon off the area at first and are subsequently pushed round to information the viewers’s actions (Imhof’s work notoriously lacks conventional seating). To at least one facet, a promenade scene has been arrange; silver balloons float above clustered chairs and tables beside a wall of mylar streamers. A look to our proper exhibits the doorway to a row of antechambers styled as locker rooms. Overhead, a jumbotron counts down the three-hour period of the efficiency, sometimes switching to poetic excerpts and livestreams of the completely different scenes. The German-born artist has clearly set her thoughts to not repeat her 2015 expertise, when her efficiency work DEAL at MoMA PS1, which concerned stay rabbits, didn’t land all that nicely with American audiences. A decade later, with a Golden Lion from the Venice Biennale for Faust (2017) beneath her belt, Imhof intends to fulfill New Yorkers the place they’re at – and has left her most excessive ritualistic props at residence.
DOOM is each an extension of and a departure from Imhof’s broadly heralded operatic work. Right here, she has set the stage for a ‘superscore’ – a multiplicity of motion and sound scores executed by a cohort of about 50 performers, lots of them native, starting from skate boarders to actors to classically skilled ballet dancers. The work pivots from the natural collaborations that characterised previous performances, reminiscent of Angst (2016), Faust and Intercourse (2019), which featured a core group of pals, musicians, fashions and dancers. In New York, most of these acquainted faces are absent, with only some veterans like Josh Johnson and Eliza Douglas making small appearances.
In DOOM, Imhof ventures into new territory with a fractured reinterpretation of William Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet (1597), which unfolds in reverse with a number of performers embodying the identical character – a continuation of her fascination with the doppelgänger motif. A shocking addition is the classical ballet, built-in into the efficiency in a method that each contrasts with and enhances Imhof’s hallmark vocabulary of deconstructed actions. Scenes from Shakespeare’s tragic romance, chosen and recited by a strikingly affectless forged, are interwoven with stay music, dance and even recitations of cultural criticism. The haunting musical rating, directed by Ville Haimala, contains mesmerizing industrial distortions of Bach and Mahler. Classical piano accompaniment by Jacob Madden and animated performances of multi-lingual rap songs by Arthur Tendeng punctuate tableaux vivants marked by Imhof’s signature imagery: performers with emotionless expressions vape, textual content, stare into area and perch on luxurious vehicles whereas resisting any eye contact with the lots of of individuals hovering round them.
These lulls within the efficiency, usually requiring viewers members to jostle for a greater view, can really feel irritating however are very intentional. Imhof is masterful at (stay) choreographing these in depth, idiosyncratic scores – tempting us to float, linger and observe completely different corners of the sprawling area – then injecting a sudden burst of motion or tune, urging us to hurry to the following scene. Whereas the artist is understood to check and frustrate the boundaries of the viewers’s consideration, the work just isn’t made with the intention to exhaust us, however as an invite to maneuver out and in of focus as we witness her layering of concepts, gestures and emotions. A lot has been manufactured from Imhof’s potential to instil a way of alternate temporality, utilizing absurdly stilted scenes and slow-motion actions that evoke unpredictability and threat. In DOOM, that approach generally rubs towards the comparatively digestible temporality of the much less deconstructed and filmic scenes and songs.
I’m left with an overriding pleasure that an artist of Imhof’s calibre is keen to maneuver away and develop her work from her previous formulations in such a extremely seen area. There’s lots to rejoice over on this bursting-at-the-seams epic, a lot of which unfolds for an viewers affected person sufficient to keep it up till the third hour when her performers begin shedding their cool and disaffection. There’s a visceral shift, within the closing 45 minutes, when Devon Teuscher performs a ballet solo; the group is so engrossed you possibly can hear a pin drop. On the finish, as Douglas belts out her initially composed tune ‘We Can’, it receives an ovation so loud it makes her break character and smile.
With DOOM, Imhof maintains her resistance to providing the viewers the direct political aid they is likely to be in search of. As an alternative, she delivers an unapologetic tribute to bop, music, theatre and literature – imbued, as at all times, with youthful defiance. Quite than surrendering to expectation, she shapes a world that calls for persistence, consideration and give up to its shifting rhythms. The result’s a piece that refuses straightforward decision, leaving us suspended in its resonance lengthy after the ultimate word fades.
DOOM: Home of Hope runs on the Park Avenue Armory, New York till 12 March
Essential picture: Anne Imhof, DOOM: Home of Hope, 2025, at Park Avenue Armory. Courtesy the artist, Galerie Buchholz, Sprüth Magers and Park Avenue Armory; {photograph}: Nadine Fraczkowski
