Anaïs Horn: High Expectations

The Austrian Cultural Forum New York presents High Expectations, a site-specific, multimedia installation by Anaïs Horn, opening on April 16, 2026, in the Frederic Morton Library. The exhibition brings together historical design, feminist literature of the interwar period, contemporary writing, sound, painting, and photography to create an immersive, multisensory environment that invites visitors to experience history as a tactile and living presence. With High Expectations, Horn presents her first institutional solo exhibition in the United States.

The exhibition takes its point of departure from the figure of Frederic Morton (born Fritz Mandelbaum), whose life and literary work (shaped by his 1939 escape from Vienna via Great Britain to New York) inform its engagement with the interwar period.

At the core of the installation is the textile design Kokain (Cocaine, 1931) by designer Erika von Trauschenfels (born 1910, Berlin; date of death unknown), one of the few women represented in the Backhausen Archive (Leopold Museum, Vienna). Horn transforms the fabric, reproduced from the original design, into a large, padded textile piece covering the entire library floor, shifting the space into an intimate, sensorial environment that visitors are invited to enter without shoes. Through this gesture, design becomes physically and emotionally accessible, opening the library as a site of reflection.

A polyphonic sound installation interweaves historical texts by Austrian women writers of the the interwar period , including Vicki Baum, Alice Schalek, Mela Hartwig, Joe Lederer, and Ea von Allesch, selected in collaboration with Katharina Manojlovic (Literaturmuseum Wien), with newly commissioned contemporary responses by Alexandra Bondi de Antoni, Anna Gien, Katharina Manojlovic, Verena Walzl, Wendy Vogel, and Avital Ronell (New York University). These layered voices form a dialogue across generations, exploring themes of autonomy, resilience, visibility, and authorship.

Emeralite library lamps function as acoustic carriers, transmitting recorded readings of both historical and contemporary texts, realized in collaboration with artist and composer Eilert Asmervik. The resulting multi-voiced soundscape transforms the library into a resonant space of literary memory and contemporary reflection.

Complementing the installation is a series of 24 mixed-media works from Horn’s series The Call of the Void, initiated during her residency at the International Studio & Curatorial Program in 2025. Drawing on historical auction photographs, these works combine painting and photography, transforming images of furniture and decorative objects into vessels of memory and latent emotion, while opening subtle connections to psychoanalytic thought and the work of Sigmund Freud.

A second body of work, After the Interior, draws on archival images of Jewish apartments in Vienna, taken in 1937–38 by photographer Robert Haas (Vienna 1898 – New York 1997), who was often commissioned by Jewish residents to document their homes and belongings prior to deportations and forced displacement; the material is now held in the Wien Museum archive. Horn transfers the images onto delicate rice paper and partially overpaints them with white gouache, erasing the interiors while leaving only the books visible. Through this gesture, the photographs shift from document to reflection: the remaining books appear as carriers of knowledge that resist erasure.

High Expectations reflects on the cultural and political transformations of the interwar period and draws parallels to the present moment. Through the intersection of design, literature, sound, and image, the exhibition foregrounds overlooked female voices while opening a space for contemporary feminist discourse and collective listening.

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.

Selected group exhibitions include Lentos Museum, Linz; MAK – Museum of Applied Arts, Vienna; Les Rencontres d’Arles; ISCP, New York; P.A.D., New York; Tutu Gallery, New York; Neue Galerie, Graz; Forum Stadtpark, Graz; Westlicht – Museum for Photography, Vienna; No Institute, Vienna; NADA Curated by (online); and Cabanon, Paris.

She has held residencies at ISCP International Studio & Curatorial Program, New York (2022, 2025); Cité Internationale des Arts, Paris (2017–18, 2021); and Castro Projects, Rome (2024), among others. Monographs of her work have been published by DCV, Berlin; Meta/Books, Amsterdam; Edition Camera Austria, Graz; Edition Fotohof, Salzburg; and Drama Books, Paris.