Roni Horn: The Detour of Identity

As far as I know, Roni Horn has never directed a movie, but whether I experience her art in a gallery or museum, or study it in catalogues and books she has produced, her perennial themes and concerns always "remind me of cinema," in one way or another, whether in the montage effect of her photographic installations or in the dream logic with which she situates objects in space, creating a zone in which our experience of a thing is as remarkable to our perception as the thing itself. - Gary Indiana

Published on the occasion of an exhibition of the same name at the Louisiana Museum of Art, Humlebæk, Denmark, The Detour of Identity reads the work of Roni Horn through the prism of cinema, thereby revealing an intense psychosexuality that is often submerged under its empirical and conceptual character.

Images of Horn's photography, sculpture and drawing are presented alongside stills and excerpts from films by Robert Altman, Carl von Dreyer, Rainer Werner Fassbinder, Alfred Hitchcock and Nicholas Roeg, among others.

Essays by Poul Erik Tøjner, director of the Louisiana Museum, cultural critic Elisabeth Bronfen, art historian Briony Fer and novelist Gary Indiana clarify the central importance of film to both the making and the understanding of Horn's practice.

Words, literature and language are often grasped as keys to Horn's art, but by juxtaposing her work with film this book reveals that the body, desire, fantasy and sexuality are equally crucial to her exploration of the instability and mutability of identity.

Co-published with the Louisiana Museum of Modern Art, Humlebæk