With a monumental new body of work and site-specific installations, two years of work come to fruition in Anne Imhof’s first solo exhibition in Portugal, Fun ist ein Stahlbad (Fun is a Steel Bath). Unfolding across the Serralves Museum of Contemporary Art campus, the exhibition acts as an arrested choreography of power, ritual, and restraint. Moving between the museum’s interior galleries and the open courtyard of Álvaro Siza’s architecture, the exhibition greets the viewer with an atmosphere of hushed anticipation, one where bodies are implied rather than present, and action is perpetually deferred.
Drawing conceptually from Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer’s diagnosis of leisure as discipline, as found in their 1947 book The Dialectic of Enlightenment, Imhof extends her longstanding engagement with performance into a sculptural language that feels acutely regulatory. The black iron swimming pool, diving platform, and arena function less as objects than as behavioral scripts. Their stripped utility evokes Friedrich Nietzsche’s tension between the Apollonian impulse toward order and containment and the Dionysian promise of release, here rigorously withheld. Fun is staged, but never delivered. At the same time, we cannot help but feel that Michel Foucault’s ideas of discipline also resonate sharply, as these structures do not merely frame space; they train the body, directing movement, speed, and anticipation.
Beyond the tensions of her philosophical framework, Imhof’s lineage within the canon of art history is palpable. Moving between spaces, we too move from the austerity of Minimalism to the relational aesthetics of participatory art, yet pointedly refusing interaction. The arena corrals circulation without spectacle; the tower offers ascent without flight; the pool absorbs desire without immersion. Even the bronze reliefs and atmospheric paintings reinforce this state of arrested becoming, where energy simmers but never erupts.
For the viewer, the effect is quietly disquieting. One becomes hyper-aware of their own bodily negotiation of space, that of waiting, watching, withholding. The exhibition succeeds precisely in this refusal of catharsis. Rather than offering resolution, Fun ist ein Stahlbad leaves us suspended within its steel logic, asking whether freedom today exists not in release, but in the endurance of constraint. —Charles Moore
