Exhibition Opening Event: Anaïs Horn | High Expectations
Image: Anaïs Horn, After the Interior, 2026, gouache and varnish on inkjet print on Hahnemuehle Rice Paper, from an archival photograph by Robert Haas (Wien Museum), 40×40cm
April 16, 2026 | 6 PM (5.30 PM Doors)
TICKETS AVAILABLE HERE
Join us for the opening of High Expectations, a site-specific, multimedia installation by Austrian artist Anaïs Horn, presented in the Frederic Morton Library at the Austrian Cultural Forum New York. Marking Horn’s first institutional solo exhibition in the United States, High Expectations transforms the library into an immersive, multisensory environment. Bringing together historical design, feminist literature of the interwar period, contemporary writing, sound, and photography, the installation invites visitors to experience history as a tactile and living presence.
At the core of the exhibition is the rare textile Kokain (1931) by designer Erika von Trauschenfels, reimagined by Horn as a large padded floor piece that reshapes the space into an intimate, sensorial setting. A layered sound installation—featuring texts by Austrian women writers such as Vicki Baum, Mela Hartwig, and Alice Schalek alongside newly commissioned contemporary responses—creates a polyphonic dialogue across generations, exploring themes of autonomy, resilience, and visibility. Complementary bodies of work further expand the exhibition’s exploration of memory and erasure: The Call of the Void reflects on objects as emotional vessels, while After the Interior revisits archival photographs of Viennese Jewish homes before 1938–39, transforming them into quiet meditations on loss, knowledge, and persistence.
Through the intersection of design, literature, sound, and image, High Expectations foregrounds overlooked female voices while opening a space for contemporary feminist discourse and collective listening.
The exhibition opening will be complemented by a slide presentation by Anaïs Horn and readings of texts by Katharina Manojlovic, a curator, author, and cultural scientist based in Vienna; Wendy Vogel, a writer and critic based in Brooklyn; and Zoe Knable, Head of Library at the ACFNY. Dr. Stephanie Buhmann, the ACFNY’s Head of Visual Arts, Architecture, and Design, will moderate a roundtable discussion with the artist, followed by a Q&A with the audience and a reception with all participants.
BIOS
Anaïs Horn, born in Graz (AT), lives and works in Paris and Lunigiana (IT). Her multidisciplinary practice moves fluidly across media, creating intimate, often site-specific settings. Her work traces the tension between presence and absence, where personal narratives – autobiographical fragments, rites of passage, or the biographies of historical (female) figures – evolve into broader reflections on contemporary existence and the ways in which memories and (her)stories echo through the spectral presence of objects and spaces. Elements of illusion and mystery frequently situate her work within a space of the in-between. With a background in design and literature, Horn graduated from the Friedl Kubelka School in Vienna in 2015. In 2022 she co-founded the publishing house Drama Books, followed by the artist-run space Cabanon in Paris in 2023. Recent solo and two-person presentations include Camera Austria, Graz; Fotohof, Salzburg; MLZ Art Dep, Trieste; Galeria RGR, Mexico City; Sophie Tappeiner, Vienna; NADA Projects, New York; Easter, Collesino; kunstGarten, Graz; Paris Photo, Emergence, Paris; MiArt, Milan; FLUCA, Plovdiv; and the National Library of Kosovo, Pristina. Monographs of her work have been published by DCV, Berlin; Meta/Books, Amsterdam; Edition Camera Austria, Graz; Edition Fotohof, Salzburg; and Drama Books, Paris.
Katharina Manojlovic (Literature Museum, Vienna) is a curator, author and cultural scientist based in Vienna. She studied German and English language and literature at the University of Vienna and University College London, as well as Image Science at Danube University Krems, and graduated from the Friedl Kubelka School of Artistic Photography, Vienna, in 2014. From 2008 to 2012, she was a visiting lecturer at the Department of German Studies at the University of Zadar, Croatia. Since 2015, she has been a research associate and curator at the Literature Museum of the Austrian National Library and has worked with EIKON – International Magazine for Photography and Media Art, FOTOGALERIE WIEN and Friedl Kubelka School for Artistic Photography, among others. Image: Anais Horn
Wendy Vogel is a writer and critic and occasional curator based in Brooklyn. Vogel’s research interests include legacies of feminist and identity-based practice, as well as the performative and ethical questions around contemporary art production and criticism. A former editor at Flash Art International, Modern Painters and Art in America, she has contributed to art-agenda, Art Review, BOMB, Brooklyn Rail, frieze, Kaleidoscope, Mousse and The New York Times, among other publications. Vogel has organized or co-organized curatorial projects at venues including the Hessel Museum at the Center for Curatorial Studies, Bard College, Annandale-on-Hudson, New York; Künstlerhaus Schloss Balmoral, Bad Ems, Germany; The Kitchen, New York; and Abrons Arts Center, New York. Image: Kristine Larson 
Please find more information on the exhibition here.
EVENING PROGRAM
5.30 PM | Doors open
6 PM | Opening remarks
Followed by a reception