Tai Kwun Contemporary in Hong Kong announced today that Anne Imhof will debut a suite of new works as part of her solo exhibition opening at the former prison turned art space next month.
Titled “House of Swans,” the exhibition, which marks the artist’s first solo in Asia, will feature “a major commission of monumental new works that construct a powerfulmultisensory experience through atmospheric scenography, installations, paintings and live performances,” according to a release. Curated by Ying Kwok and Tiffany Leung, the exhibition will take over three floors of the venue’s JC Contemporary and F Hall galleries.
“Throughout the show, Imhof juxtaposes the classical forms of oil painting, bronze sculpture and ballet with large-scale sonic installations, physical performances and videos to create charged encounters in the gallery space that explore bodily presence, restriction and authority,” Tai Kwun said in a press release.
Anne Imhof’s 2025 video Citizen (stills) will be among the works that debut in “House of Swans.”
©Anne Imhof/Courtesy the artist and Sprüth Magers
As part of the exhibition’s opening, Imhof’s collaborators (both musicians and dancers) and the Hong Kong Ballet will stage House of Swans on September 25 and 26. The performance will also be staged at various points in the galleries during the exhibition’s run.
House of Swans will serve as a companion piece to DOOM, the three-hour performance piece she debuted at the Park Avenue Armory in New York last year. DOOM was loosely based on Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet, and House of Swans acts as a sort of origin story for the titular house, which lived alongside the bard’s iconic Capulets and Montagues. In an interview with the South China Morning Post, Imhof promised a “queered up” take on the play and “a fantastical piece about love and peace during a time of war.”
In its release, Tai Kwun Contemporary adds that both the performance and Imhof’s exhibition as a whole follow “a heroine struggling on her path to love through a chaotic cityscape.” Among the other works that will debut in the show are a 2025 untitled bronze sculptural relief, depicting female pleasure, as well as Citizen (2025), a 81-minute video work that “feature suggestions of violence and scenes involving trans bodies,” according to SCMP.
The release also notes that DOOM’s featuring of ballet in one sequence when the discipline first entered Imhof’s oeuvre and that will be “further develop[ed] in her presentation at Tai Kwun.” In her SCMP interview, Imhof said, “I’m interested in [classical forms] such as ballet because I want to tell different stories. Because autocrats use ballet as a soft power tool par excellence, it doesn’t mean it’s theirs. This is almost like an attempt to claim it back.”
Devon Teuscher performing in Anne Imhof’s DOOM (2025), at Park Avenue Armory, New York.
Photo Nadine Fraczkowski/©Anne Imhof/Courtesy the artist, Park Avenue Armory, Sprüth Magers and Galerie Buchholz
SCMP arts editor Enid Tsui notes another connection between the two performances: Devon Teuscher, a principal dancer at the American Ballet Theatre. Teuscher is now Imhof’s partner and the two met during DOOM; Teuscher now stars in House of Swans.
Imhof first rose to international acclaim when she was chosen to represent Germany at the 2017 Venice Biennale. Her performance, Faust, won her the Golden Lion for best national pavilion, one of the Biennale’s two top honors. In the almost a decade since, she has staged performances at Tate Modern in London (2019), the Art Institute of Chicago (2019), Palais de Tokyo in Paris (2021), the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam (2022), Kunsthaus Bregenz in Austria (2024), and the Serralves Museum in Porto (2025).
“I think there’s a depression, a melancholia in my work that people respond to,” Imhof told SCMP. “But this melancholia is in almost all of us. In a way, things that I see around me and feel are to be addressed in my work.”
