Ben Luke
speaker
1,919 appearances
8 recordings
1 series
first heard Apr 2026
last heard 1 Sep
Ben Luke’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
Trend
recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 8 in all, peaking in Aug 2026 with 3.
Appearances
Angst was quickly followed by Faust, a pivotal piece made for the German Pavilion at the Venice Biennale in 2017, which won the Biennale's Golden Lion for Best Pavilion.
It again featured a collective performance, this time in a construction of glass walls, floors and ceilings,
on around and under which performers were visible for the full seven months of the biennale in modes ranging from just hanging out to apparently masturbating and performing songs the piece met its moment and seemed dramatically suited to the era of disaffection among young people marked by extreme wealth inequality and social division as right-wing and far-right movements like brexit in the uk and the donald trump presidency in the us marked global power shifts
Faust was billed by the pavilion organizers as evoking, quote, various constructions of power and powerlessness, capriciousness and violence, resistance and freedom, and much of it was captured in a deluge of social media commentary and documentation by its viewers.
Faust marked a turning point, and ever since, Anna has been at the forefront of developments in contemporary art, creating ever more ambitious presentations for international museums and spaces.
Among them were the works Sex from 2019 for the Tanks at Tate Modern, Nature Morte for the Palais de Tokyo in Paris from 2021, the exhibition Wish You Were Gay at the Kunsthaus Bregenz in Austria in 2024, and in 2025, Doom, House of Hope at the Park Avenue Armory in New York.
This latest opus featured Mon 60 performers across three hours and included passages of dance including ballet and flexing, a reverse telling of Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet, the music of Johann Sebastian Bach and 20 Cadillac cars which became a form of stage or platform for the performers.
Also present were barriers like those used to contain crowds at concerts, which have become a significant sculptural form for Anna in her museum installations.
Indeed, her sculptural practice has hugely expanded.
She makes figurative bronze reliefs that evoke classical sculpture, but subvert the scale and composition so that the figure's hands are vastly expanded.
and seem to reorientate the agency of the female figures depicted.
She's also made her first public sculpture for her 2025 exhibition at the Soralves Museum in Porto in Portugal.
Stalbard from 2025 is a huge outdoor swimming pool made in black steel located in an inaccessible courtyard and behind a barrier inspired by the derelict pool at Pripyat, the modernist Soviet city that was deserted after the Chernobyl disaster in 1986.
As such, it's defiantly anti-monumental, despite its scale.
Together with paintings of waves and explosive clouds, some of which she scratches into with a razor blade, and works like Citizen from 2025, the film based on Doom, Anna has created an increasingly rich practice in its visual forms and in its meanings.
And I began our conversation, which took place after the opening of Anna's exhibition called Citizen at Sprut Magas in London in June 2026, with the idea of meaning and particularly how it's created.
After seeing the work Sex at Tate Modern in 2019, I wrote that I'd never been as aware of an artist using my presence as a performative tool.
Meanwhile, in a recent conversation with the US photographer Tyler Mitchell in Flash Art magazine,
Anna said of Doom that it made her question how much she was deliberately placing meaning and how much meaning emerges through the viewer, through timing, perception and experience.
So I asked Anna if she could tell us more about how she sees the role of the viewer as not just being present, not just observing, not even just participating with their bodies, but actually creating meaning in the work.
Showing 1301–1320 of 1,919 · page 66 of 96
← Previous
Next →