BREMEN.- Rebecca Horn is one of the most prominent contemporary artists. Known worldwide for her space-consuming installations, her protean oeuvre comprises drawings, collages, performances, films, as well as objects and moving sculptures that develop a secret life of their own. Concurrent with the TANZ BREMEN festival, the Weserburg is going back to the beginnings of her creative work and is mounting an exhibition centered around her films and performances. Her early works already exhibit striking poetic force and iconographic diversity; their point of departure and source of energy is the human body, whose possibilities and limitations she explores and seeks to overcome.

In the early 1970s, Rebecca Horn began filming her performances. With her body sculptures and her so-called body extensions she succeeds in exploring both space as well as her own perception in an entirely new way. In the process, enigmatic objects come into play: feathered masks, moving gadgetry, and artistic extensions to individual parts of the body and limbs, which at the same time transform her actors into mythic creatures. Titles such as Unicorn, Body Fan, and Cockfeather Mask already betray the metaphorical force with which her performances are meaningfully charged, pointing beyond their physical presence and immediate sensuousness. Culture and nature, body and mechanized object, artificialness and reality enter into an exciting relationship. In her later spatial compositions, Rebecca Horn increasingly substitutes sculptures for the human body that constantly repeat minimalist sequences of movements. The sculptures appear in her first feature films, such as in The Gigolo (1978), in which, among other things, a table dances the tango.

The exhibition at the Weserburg is presenting large-format projections of the films Performances II (1973), Berlin—Exercises in Nine Parts (1974–75), and The Gigolo (1978). Photographs from the 1970s as well as objects such as the famous Finger Gloves provide fascinating insight into Rebecca Horn’s early oeuvre. The presentation is being supplemented by objects and sculptural installations, including Dialogue between the Silver Swings, which has been a permanent part of the museum’s collection since its founding.

The supporting program includes the feature-length films La Ferdinanda: Sonata for a Medici Villa (1981), Buster's Bedroom (1990), as well as her most recent film, Moon Mirror Journey (2011), in which Rebecca Horn looks back at her most important works of the past forty years.