Roni Horn Bücher

“What do you know about water? Only that it’s everywhere differently.” Roni Horn In 2000 Roni Horn published Another Water, an examination of the water of the River Thames through extensively footnoted photographs. This new edition of Another Water includes a new edit of the photographic aspect of the work. Water is a central theme for Horn: as a component of weather, a defining feature of her beloved Iceland, and as a beautiful, changeable element on which life depends. Another Water is an ode to the substance of water but also to its impact on identity and imagination: in Horn’s words, “You can’t talk about water without talking about oneself.” Roni Horn was born in New York in 1955 where she continues to live and work. Horn’s solo exhibition includes those at the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York, Museum Winterthur and Tate Modern in London. Books are an important medium for Horn, both as a means of distributing her art and as exhibited objects. Her publications with Steidl include Cabinet of (2004), A Kind of You (2007) and Roni Horn aka Roni Horn (2009).

This work is about the phenomena of appearance and disappearance. The book shows 36 head-shots of a clown. If mutability of appearance is integral to the phenomenon of the cloud – since dissolution or erasure is inevitable – the converse is proposed for the clown.

In this collection of 120 black-and-white photos, Roni Horn takes us on a journey through a locker room in Reykjavik, Iceland. With minimal movement between the camera and subject in succeeding frames, and through the use of a slow-shutter technique, this finely crafted body of work provokes the viewer to contemplate the subtleties of each image. A blur behind a portal suggests that someone else is in the locker room with the viewer. Room numbers, open and closed doors, and intersecting hallways give clues to the surroundings, and as we turn each page of the book, we sense the subtle shifting of time and space in photographs that reflect a sculptor’s attention to the details of surfaces, repetition, and form.

bird presents the culmination of Roni Horn’s long-running photographic series of taxidermied Icelandic wildfowl. Photographed at close range against white backgrounds (as though obeying the conventional format of studio portraiture) the birds are viewed from behind, their unique physiognomies and markings resulting in inscrutable shapes and patterns on the photographs’ surfaces. Despite the singular form of the title, the birds in this series are presented in pairs, images that are hung side by side one another highlighting the differences and similarities between the two. The gesture of doubling — as an aesthetic and conceptual strategy — has been a recurrent motif for Horn since 1980, a tool that invites careful scrutiny from the viewer, altering the dynamic of the work. Horn’s images are accompanied by a text by the writer and curator Philip Larratt-Smith. Avoiding a dense, didactic reading of the series, Larratt-Smith has compiled an extended series of quotes, anecdotes and idioms, garnered from film, literature, photographers’ monographs and Horn’s own writings.

"Everyone has a story about the weather. This may be the single thing each of us holds in common. And though the weather varies greatly from here to there, it is, ultimately, one weather that we share. Small talk everywhere has occasioned the popular distribution of the weather. Some say talking about the weather is talking about oneself. And with each passing day, the weather increasingly becomes ours, if not us. "Weather Reports You" is one beginning of a collective self-portrait." Over the past two years Roni Horn has been working with a small team in the south west of Iceland gathering personal testimonies from people talking about the weather. These "weather reports" include descriptions, reflections, memories and stories based on experiences of the weather that range from the matter-of-fact to the marvelous. The different nuances and usages of language suggest that the weather is not just a matter of meteorological conditions but is, in Horn's words, "a metaphor for the physical, metaphysical, political, social and moral energy of a person and a place."