Roni Horn

Hélène Cixous

Roni Horn's remarkable body of work continues to communicate how she imaginatively inhabits the world and combines a careful study of the role of language in perception. Horn's unique ability to engage the viewer with a vivid sense of time and place in her range of sculptures, books, drawings and photographic installations, provide an active pursuit of self-revelation and the transience of form. For Horn's exhibition at Hauser & Wirth London in 2004, the entire floorplan of the main gallery was given over to the installation of Rings of Lispector. Consisting of interconnecting rubber tiles, the work is inlaid with select passages from Brazilian writer Clarice Lispector's book Agua VivaStream of Life). Translated by Hélène Cixous, phrases appear on the floor in circular arrangements, echoing the movement of raindrops on the surface of water. The work embodies a sense of the dialectic between architectural space and poetic force, encouraging one to experience the rubber physically underfoot and to view the words from above. This act of location addresses inner emotions with the idea of landscape.

Agua Viva : Seventeen Paradoxes

Sited in a converted library building on a promontory overlooking the ocean in the town of Stykkish�lmur on the west coast of Iceland, VATNASAFN / LIBRARY OF WATER incorporates many of Roni Horn's abiding artistic concerns with water and weather, reflection and illumination, and the fluid nature of identity. Twenty-four glass columns containing water from glaciers around Iceland refract and reflect the day into a rubber floor embedded with words used to describe weather, inside or out. VATNASAFN / LIBRARY OF WATER also offers a space for community gatherings, a studio for writers, and it houses an oral archive of weather reports gathered from people who live in and around Stykkish�lmur. This book surveys the interconnecting elements of Roni Horn's long-term project on the island through a series of image sequences and texts. It also includes a selection of writings by the artist inspired by her experience of being in Iceland.

Stykkishólmur, Iceland

Vatnasafn/Library of Water

Wexner Center for the Visual Arts

Emily Dickinson's poems stand alone in the English language in their severe yet wild shapeliness and unhindered dexterity of thought. In Earths Grow Thick, the American artist Roni Horn put those poems--or lines from them--to new uses, incorporating her words in a series of austere, stick-like sculptures. Horn makes similar use of William Blake, but her sympathy with the work of Dickinson is clear, and results in a beautiful form or word sculpture. This handsome catalogue is published in conjunction with the first exhibition to present the four bodies of Horn's work comprising the Dickinson sculptures. The illustrations are complemented by texts ranging from Judith Fox's interview with Horn to bell hooks' intimate recollections of her childhood introduction to Dickinson's work.

Earths Grow Thick

Rings of Lispector (Agua Viva): Agua viva : seventeen paradoxes

Pooling Waters

Photographs of a young woman's face taken throughout Iceland in the October, 2010.

Haraldsdóttir. Part two

To Place

As the winner of the fourth Joan Miro prize, American artist Roni Horn (born 1955) received a monograph exhibition of her work at the Fundacio Joan Miro in Barcelona and CaixaForum, which this volume accompanies. Though Horn considers drawing to be the activity unifying all strands of her work, she is prolific across multiple media, including sculpture, photography, books and works on paper. Her artistic practice links aspects of nature, landscape and materiality with the mechanics of perception and communication. As affirmed by this recent award, Horn's oeuvre is endlessly open-ended. "Roni Horn: Everything Was Sleeping as if the Universe Were a Mistake" includes an interview with the artist by Julie Ault.

Everything Was Sleeping As If the Universe Were a Mistake

Inspired by the philosopher and writer Helene Cixous, which whom the photographer and artist Roni Horn has collaborated before, "Index Cixous" questions the nature of language in its most fundamental sense and proposes a version--one without words, but which can be read as any other. Both Horn and Cixous are concerned with communication wrought out of material space. Cixous writes about women's language arising from the female body, and she argues for a new language, one not in thrall to patriarchy but that acknowledges the life-giving force and history of the feminine.

Cix Pax

Index Cixous

"Roni Horn's To Place is an ongoing series of small editions, each book a unique look at the relationship between identity and location. They take as their starting point Iceland and Horn's evolving experiences there, illustrated in watercolors, photographs, typographic drawings, and text"--Amazon.com.

Iśland

Roni Horn (*1955 in New York) has been working in diverse visual and material media since the beginning of her career in the late 1970s, creating drawings, photographs, texts, artist books, and sculptures. There are themes that Horn deals with repeatedly in many of her pieces. Primary among them are the questions concerning one's ability to transform and multiply one's identity and about the process of showing deviations between the nature of things and the use of artistic means to manifest them visually. The catalogue accompanying the exhibition includes prominent works of the artist from the past twenty-years, as well as new works, which will be shown for the first time at the Fondation Beyeler. In constantly new ways they appear before the viewer as a process of becoming that is again set in motion by the world, moving beyond any kind of fixed identity. Exhibition: Fondation Beyeler, Riehen/Basel 2.10.2016-1.1.2017

Dave Hickey

The mutable version of identity is not an aberration... the fixed version is the aberration. Roni Horn Comprising fifteen pairs of portraits collected from throughout a life... Roni Horn was born in New York where she continues to live and work. Recent solo exhibitions of her work include the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, Tate Modern, London, Musèe dArt Moderne de la Ville de Paris, Fundacao Serralves, Porto, Fotomuseum Winterthur and Centre Pompidou, Paris. Her recent publications Dictionary of Water, This is Me, This is You, Cabinet of, Her, Her, Her, & Her, Wonderwater (Alice Offshore), Index Cixous, 2003 05, Weather Reports You, Vatnasafn/ Library of Water, Herdubreid at Home, Roni Horn aka Roni Horn have all been published by Steidl.

These photographs of the Thames River show many changes in light, movement and colour, and are accompanied by references to poems and short stories. An additional level is provided in Dead Body Reports, collected by the artist from London police.

Another Water

This incredible collection of digitally manipulated photographic images are from Horn's long-term project documenting the River Thames.

Dictionary of Water

The reports included here were collected throughout 2005 and 2006. The accompanying snapshots were taken at the time and place of each intervew. This publication initiates the archive of weather reports that will be collected and maintained onthe VATNASAFN/LIBRARY OF WATER website.

Weather Reports You

An evocative chronicle of the power of solitude in the natural world I’m often asked, but have no idea why I chose Iceland, why I first started going, why I still go. In truth I believe Iceland chose me.—from the introduction Contemporary artist Roni Horn first visited Iceland in 1975 at the age of nineteen, and since then, the island’s treeless expanse has had an enduring hold on Horn’s creative work. Through a series of remarkable and poetic reflections, vignettes, episodes, and illustrated essays, Island Zombie distills the artist’s lifelong experience of Iceland’s natural environment. Together, these pieces offer an unforgettable exploration of the indefinable and inescapable force of remote, elemental places, and provide a sustained look at how an island and its atmosphere can take possession of the innermost self. Island Zombie is a meditation on being present. It vividly conveys Horn’s experiences, from the deeply profound to the joyful and absurd. Through powerful evocations of the changing weather and other natural phenomena—the violence of the wind, the often aggressive birds, the imposing influence of glaciers, and the ubiquitous presence of water in all its variety—we come to understand the author’s abiding need for Iceland, a place uniquely essential to Horn’s creative and spiritual life. The dramatic surroundings provoke examinations of self-sufficiency and isolation, and these ruminations summon a range of cultural companions, including El Greco, Emily Dickinson, Judy Garland, Wallace Stevens, Edgar Allan Poe, William Morris, and Rachel Carson. While brilliantly portraying nature’s sublime energy, Horn also confronts issues of consumption, destruction, and loss, as the industrial and man-made encroach on Icelandic wilderness. Filled with musings on a secluded region that perpetually encourages a sense of discovery, Island Zombie illuminates a wild and beautiful Iceland that remains essential and new.

Iceland Writings

Island Zombie

Anne Carson

John Waters

Louise Bourgeois

Each volume contains texts written in response to the same selection of Horn's titles/phrases. The annotaters are sculptor Louise Bourgeois, writers Anne Carson and Hélène Cixous, and film director John Waters.

Roni Horn

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