It’s been nearly ten years since I wandered through a dense fog among drones and vaping club kids during Anne Imhof’s legendary performance opera Angst II at Hamburger Bahnhof in Berlin. It was the fall of 2016, between Brexit and Trump’s first election victory. On election day, The New York Times had estimated an 85 per cent chance of a Clinton win. Similarly, polls suggested with 80 per cent certainty that the British people would vote to remain. Both results came as a shock, shattering the liberal Western self-image.
I remember my 20-year-old self feeling that Imhof had captured, with uncanny precision, the sensation of being chronically online – alone in a crowd, desensitised by a never-ending feed of commerce and convictions. Her work reflected the hyper-individualised and digitised subject of our time, and her deconstructed opera, where visitors walked among posing teens trapped in nonsensical actions, embodied the fragmented reality – post-truth and at the end of history – the consequences of which we are now witnessing.
A decade later, I found myself in the woody foyer of Park Avenue Armory, surrounded by New York’s in-crowd. Trump is serving a second term, joking – or not? – about staying for a third. It is hard to tell sincerity from farce when tech billionaire Elon Musk is leading the newly established Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE). Brexit now feels like a mere blip on the past decade’s alt-right radar. We were waiting to enter Imhof’s latest performance, DOOM – House of Hope, an all-encompassing work that both continues and reevaluates the conditions once depicted in Angst II. As the title suggests, the performance oscillates between detachment and emotion, searching, in true meta-modern spirit, for the lost narrative in a world without structure.
The Wade Thompson Drill Hall has been transformed into a gigantic gothic gymnasium, with an enormous jumbotron counting down the three-hour performance hanging from the ceiling of the dimly lit space. The floor is strewn with twenty glossy black Cadillac SUVs, some covered with white car wraps, transformed into ghostly motor apparitions, others framed by metal scaffolding resembling exoskeletons for these status machines. Their hyper-reflective surfaces mirror the room’s spotlights, casting reflections across the black court markings. In the background, small draped table groups are set up near a stage equipped with a drum set, guitar, and bass, and decorated with silver helium balloons and a glitter curtain, as if dressed in an ironically styled prom aesthetic.
When the performance begins, the hall is divided by a concert barrier, creating a clear boundary between audience and performance. Spectators can look but not touch until the fourth wall is shattered by the first of many somewhat obvious but effective Brechtian Verfremdung-gestures, and some of the actors, dancers, and models who have been moving like zombies to droning music storm the barricades. Others climb onto the roofs of the cars and chant in unison: “We’re doomed,” “We hope,” “We’re fucked, we’re dead, I think I made you up inside my head.” The music distorts and thunders from the speakers. It is unsettling, a feeling intensified when the barriers open and visitors become part of a dumb mass funnelled into the performance, blindly following the spotlight or trailing behind a procession of apathetic doomsday demonstrators and post-apocalyptic fashion flagellants.
Eventually, we all organize around the center of the room. Some take seats as spectators, while others step into the circle to dance. A fragmented, reverse adaptation of Romeo and Juliet, beginning with the lovers’ passion-driven double suicide and ending with their first encounter, is interwoven with dance numbers, singing performances, monologues, and monotonous, continuous posing – vaping, scrolling, staring, making out –by the performance’s forty participants.
Where Angst II lacked a gravitational center, playing out more as a mosaic of moving still-lifes without clear beginnings or endings, DOOM constructs a narrative through loosely connected scenes stacked atop one another. The ticking jumbotron creates a sense of direction and inevitability, and the performance often has a clear center. At the same time, the narrative repeatedly wants to dissolve and break apart into various micro-events, making it impossible for viewers to take in the work in its entirety. More than halfway through the performance, a door opens to the teenage characters’ private sphere, revealing a corridor of small rooms with lockers, mattresses, and a gaming computer. Entering inevitably means missing whatever unfolds outside in the main hall.
The space for individual improvisation and doomscrolling parallel play that characterized Imhof’s previous Gesamtkunstwerk has, in DOOM, given way to synchronisation. Behind perfectly choreographed ballet numbers, directed dialogues, and choruses, lies a symbolism that points beyond the individual and toward the collective. Yet, the performance remains somewhat skeptical towards the discipline required for such organization by not entirely abandoning images of the decadent and bored youth that are also part of contemporary reality. In this way, the performance becomes a tug-of-war between individual and collective, narrative and fragmentation. This is a welcome development from the artist’s earlier nihilistically detached world-building, which at this point in time feels too removed from contemporary reality and its urgencies.
It’s impossible to discuss Imhof without addressing aesthetics and surface. Her signature look – Balenciaga-coded and thoughtfully cool – also permeates DOOM. The performers look like they belong in an underground club, and many of them do: It girl Talia Ryder plays Juliet, Berlin-based neo-grunge artist Lia Lia embodies Tybalt, and Imhof’s longtime collaborator, Balenciaga model Eliza Douglas, is of course present. Casting was done through the high-profile Midland Agency, and the Berlin-based architecture firm sub provided the set design. Everything is made to be photographed, filmed, and posted on social media. The near-absence of distinction between reality and fictional coolness, along with the plea to share everything under the hashtag PAADOOM, exposes a deep-seated anxiety; the performative self-consciousness evokes a sense of abjection.
Sure, we might be annoyed by Imhof’s reproduction of contemporary superficiality and the sharp irony of performers being hyper-aware of the audience’s gaze and occasionally looking directly into the camera, even if this is a technique meant to reveal the construction of aesthetics itself. It feels dated to be so cynical and blasé that you critique the present by wallowing in the darkest corners of culture. When the dancers repeatedly mimic putting a gun to their heads, it reads as a tired trope. Yet, and despite of the presence of familiar Imhof- motifs – cola cans, roses against black lacquer, eternally vaping figures – DOOM also expresses a longing for a universal narrative where love and beauty transcend time, even if the path there is winding and lined with nihilistic goths. When ultra-cool still lifes – such as a live full-back tattoo sessiongoing on for the entirety of the performance – merge with high-romantic Shakespeare, it feels both real and beautiful.
In an intimate scene in the performance’s back room, Romeo, played by Levi Strasser, sings a ballad accompanied by an electric piano while Juliet lies on a mattress. It’s vulnerable, adolescent, and genuine, like something that could take place in a teenager’s bedroom. In another scene, an all-girl rock band plays energetically, and the entire ensemble forms a mosh pit in front of the stage, making me forget that I’m watching a performance and not a concert. In several of these scenes, there is an honest attempt at something beautiful. Whether through fragile voices or the ways bodies twist, irony gives way to sincerity.
In this way, Imhof has made a genuine effort to develop her artistry and create a work that feels meaningful without being overly utopian, one that successfully captures the complexity of our time: the fragile, the stylised, the emotional, the cynical. We are doomed, yet we still hope. Perhaps it is precisely in this ambivalence that Imhof’s work resonates so deeply. The performance lands in a feeling of tenderness, a paradoxical warmth in a cold and distant world – one that is sometimes so dull that you find yourself retreating to a corner to scroll through your phone. We may live in a hyper-aestheticised, digitalised, and post-truth world, but Anne Imhof captures how many of us are still driven by a desire to find something real within it.
