The Croatian British multi-disciplinary artist Marianna Simnett is best known for films that explore the recesses of desire, pain, violence and power, in which her body is often a site of exploration and transformation. She mines personal and cultural history, including the folklore of her mother\u2019s Balkan homeland and the history of conflict in that region, to expose the jagged edges of suppressed memory, unspoken anxiety and generational trauma in hypnotic, disturbing and empathetic works that span performance, sculpture, drawing and painting.<\/p>\n
Simnett often works by creating tension between apparently opposite states. In The Needle and the Larynx<\/em> (2016), the boundary between care and violence is blurred, as viewers watch the artist\u2019s throat being injected with Botox, a procedure usually reserved for young men who want to lower their voices. Horror and revulsion figure heavily in her work, but there are also flashes of joy, humour, and surprise: in her new show at the Secession in Vienna the bright lights and exuberance of the circus make the darkness of the shadows all the more unsettling. The artist has also created a book for the show, Dodo Margarine<\/em>, written by Camilla Grudova and illustrated by Simnett. It is an unexpectedly soothing mixture of fiction, mood and atmosphere, containing hints of the show\u2019s themes.<\/p>\n Marianna Simnett\u2019s Fountain<\/em> (2026), a neon of a woman urinating, which she regards as a \u201cvery liberated gesture\u201d, references Balkan folklore and Greek mythology Photo: Sophie P\u00f6lzl; courtesy of the artist and Soci\u00e9t\u00e9, Berlin<\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n The Art Newspaper: Your new exhibition is called Circus<\/em>. Could you set the scene?<\/strong><\/p>\n Marianna Simnett:<\/strong> It\u2019s spectacular, but also extremely minimal. The Secession gave me the basement, and we\u2019ve gone full goth\u2014black ceiling, floors, walls, everything is pitch black. I\u2019m mostly known for my video installations, so I wanted to switch the narrative and present a light, sound and sculpture exhibition. Catherine Wheel<\/em> (2026), the first work, refers to a very thrilling firework\u2014I loved it when I was a kid\u2014but also to a torture and execution method. There is something about the momentum, the ferocity, the switch from violence into excitement and delight and thrill that interests me. You encounter a blue spinning reflective skirt, which alludes to the tent of a circus, or to the garment of a female. It\u2019s a hypnotic and disturbing work, [accompanied by] the sound of me being tickled for a period of four hours.<\/p>\n How did you choose your tickler?<\/strong><\/p>\n I was very specific about who I hired to tickle me: a friend of mine called Tim Dahl\u2014Tickler Tim. He is a prolific musician, and he plays bass for Lydia Lunch, among others. He\u2019s strong, punk, and doesn\u2019t mind being punched in the face. He\u2019s also not a creep, a vital criterion. And then there\u2019s his immense experience with sound; he was able to play me like an instrument, inducing an enormous dynamic range, from croaks to cackles to speaking in tongues. He was dripping with sweat, he was absolutely exhausted [during the performance].<\/p>\n The circus is a place of extremes and transgressions; it\u2019s a strange way to entertain children.<\/strong><\/p>\n I try not to moralise in my work but to reveal that nobody is exempt from having perverse pleasures. The act of looking is inherently a type of violence. And entertainment is often violence shrouded in a fun disguise, just like our world of bright colours and capitalism and glee and opportunity. Desirability often conceals dark truths.<\/p>\n In your sound-and-light installation Faint with Light<\/em> (2016), bars of light rise and fall to a soundtrack of you hyperventilating to make yourself faint four times, to the point of seizure. It is inspired in part by the astonishing story of your grandfather, who escaped death during the Holocaust by fainting as he was about to be shot.<\/strong><\/p>\n Fainting is historically problematic. The French philosopher Catherine Cl\u00e9ment\u2019s book Syncope: The Philosophy of Rapture<\/em> was a vital source for me in reframing the act of fainting. She talks about it as a type of rapture, exiting the world to pause for a moment, and then come back anew.<\/p>\n The artist\u2019s Catherine Wheel<\/em> (2026) is a kinetic installation featuring a swirling skirt, taking its name from both a thrilling firework and a Medieval torture method Photo: Sophie P\u00f6lzl; courtesy of the artist and Soci\u00e9t\u00e9, Berlin<\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n The story behind the fainting work is my grandfather\u2019s survival. I\u2019m conscious of not using the Holocaust to prop up my artwork, and this is not a piece about that, but it was my impetus to make it, knowing that I could never get close to someone else\u2019s experience, especially when it contains so much horror. My approach to the piece was to emulate the gesture without the narrative and without representing my body. And because I\u2019m a film-maker, I was looking at all the fainting females in early cinema\u2014the 1920s and 30s were full of swooning women. And then there\u2019s [the psychoanalyst Sigmund] Freud and his six symptoms of hysteria, one of which was fainting.<\/p>\n How does your approach to performance compare to that of others in the field?<\/strong><\/p>\n The 1970s body performance artists were very much into risking the live body on stage\u2014it is precisely that tension keeping the audience on the edge of their seat. Although they certainly paved the way for my work, I don\u2019t want to prompt fear for the performer\u2019s body. It\u2019s deliberately a recording and not a live act; the danger has always already happened. And, sure, these are risky undertakings, being tickled or passing out or inducing seizures, but it\u2019s not for you to worry about as a viewer.<\/p>\n We don\u2019t actually see your body at all in this show, do we?<\/strong><\/p>\n I want my body to disappear. You might ask why I do this to myself; you could go back to how I was born, how I grew up. But more conceptually\u2014the cold answer\u2014is that it\u2019s not about me. I don\u2019t want pity. I want to create a dynamic space for other people\u2019s experiences to flood into the work. It\u2019s difficult to create what I call \u201cvoid art\u201d, because it sounds like a cop-out, but it\u2019s about creating the perfect amount of openness for others to become open too, exposing our most fragile states through empathetic engagement.<\/p>\n And yet it is a very bodily show.<\/strong><\/p>\n I think fainting, tickling and pissing all came together in one crystallised act. I felt it was the right moment to go back to the raw states of the body. Tickling is the perfect example of the collision between desire, satisfaction, repulsion and distress. It completely dismantles these neat justifications of what we\u2019re supposed to feel.<\/p>\n Fountain<\/em> (2026) is a neon of a urinating woman. It makes me think of brothel signs\u2014we are a long way from seeing women\u2019s bodies as powerful in a non-sexual way.<\/strong><\/p>\n I used a preparatory line drawing of that neon in the promo for the show, and Meta [owner of Facebook and Instagram] took it down, and then I put a censored sign over the vagina, and they took it down again. I was like, \u201cWhat is so offensive about a woman having a wee?\u201d It\u2019s indicative of the biases that control and suppress us, whether machine or human. And there\u2019s this use of industrial language to describe a seemingly private act, right? There\u2019s a rudeness to the materials. I wanted Circus<\/em> to have a raw, brutal quality\u2014there\u2019s no delicacy except for the fabric of the skirt. And depicting liquid with light was a challenging thing to do.<\/p>\n In the installation Faint with Light<\/em> (2016), seen here at Copenhagen Contemporary, Simnett interprets her grandfather\u2019s experience of escaping death in the Second World War by fainting just as he was about to be shot Photo: Anders Sune Berg; courtesy of the artist<\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n The origins of this is a Balkan folktale where a urinating woman wards off the devil and evil spirits. Also in Greek mythology, there\u2019s Baubo, who used skirt-lifting as a trick to make Demeter laugh, which opened up her ability to eat and drink and produce nourishment and fertility for the earth. The Greek term for lifting one\u2019s skirt to expose the buttocks or genitalia is anasyrma<\/em>\u2014there\u2019s a word for the gesture itself. It\u2019s fascinating, it really goes back deep. It\u2019s about courage and resistance and retaliation and refusal in many different cultures.<\/p>\n I think of it as a very joyous work. I was experimenting with squatting or standing. But squatting is just so ridiculously petty, I wanted it to feel like a very liberated gesture.<\/p>\n How important is music and sound in your work?<\/strong><\/p>\n I grapple with it. Sound is present in all of my work, even if the emphasis is on silence. It\u2019s one of the most powerful mediums you can work with. It penetrates, it\u2019s inescapable, it stays in your brain. I compose and play music, often soundtracking my own films. It\u2019s something I\u2019ve grown up with since I was five. I feel very comfortable and familiar with it, but I also feel a resistance to the authoritarianism of classical training. And I can\u2019t really shake that, because it\u2019s part of my upbringing.<\/p>\n \u2022 <\/em>Marianna Simnett: Circus![\"\"](\"https:\/\/cdn.sanity.io\/images\/cxgd3urn\/production\/fb7b749624ebaa48a348b76f06a7b5df11b45a8e-3543x2362.jpg?w=1920&h=1280&q=85&fit=crop&auto=format\"\/)
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