PRESS
selected reviews
REACTIONS TO ANY WAR ANY ENEMY:
"Lena Herzog's “Any War Any Enemy” is a hauntingly beautiful spatial poem that takes us on a liminal journey about nuclear annihilation. Rather than disassociating and letting power structures sleepwalk us all into catastrophe, she explores a new form of transcendental anti-war protest by leaning into an underlying existential angst that doesn't turn away from the human costs. It's a cautionary tale that serves as a wake-up call about the insanity of mutually-assured destruction, and an opportunity to use VR to ground apocalyptic abstractions into an embodied experience that allows us to bear witness to possible futures that should be avoided at all costs."
—Kent Bye
Voices of VR
“A multimedia work about humanity doomed to extinction.
Lena Herzog's works depict faces deformed by fear and awareness of the end, bodies folded in on themselves, enveloped in fire, the last moments of life, the ultimate explosion that will turn us into a supernova.”
—Annachiara Sacchi
Corriere Della Sera
“chiaroscuro works of great impact by Lena Herzog”
—Riccardo Petito
Il Gazzettino
SUNDAY SECTION
CULTURA: Lena Herzog. Omnicide approaches
by Annachiara Sacchi
April 7, 2024
They call them "apocalyptic films." The end of the world averted at the last minute by a perfectly coiffed hero, possibly with a beautiful girl in his arms. "But those are survivalist movies," representing logic and the “good guys” saving the Earth and defeating the “bad guys.” No, they have nothing to do with the Apocalypse. Mine are, in fact, apocalyptic works." The meaning of this sentence, uttered by Lena Herzog, is even clearer when one sees the images of her new work, Any War Any Enemy, curated by Silvia Burini and Giuseppe Barbieri, which will be on preview in Venice from April 11 (at Ca' Foscari Zattere, while the official opening will be held on the 18th, coinciding with the Biennale) and which the artist will talk about again on Thursday 11, special guest of the literature festival Incroci di Civiltà.
ART SECTION
In Venice the new work of the multidisciplinary conceptual artist Lena Herzog is presented
by Eugenio Giannetta
April 12, 2024
at the Crossroads of Civilizations, the International Literature Festival, making a foray into art and hosting a preview of Lena Herzog's exhibition, Any War Any Enemy, an exhibition project proposed to coincide with the 60th Art Biennale.
VENEZIAMESTRE
Lena Herzog's alarm: «Difficult times ahead»
by Riccardo Petito
April 19, 2024
EXHIBITION INVENICE«There will be no salvation for us, unless we learn how to look at ourselves, deep within ourselves, or else, very difficult times are coming" A message, more than ever, is linked to chiaroscuro works of great impact by Lena Herzog, an American artist of Russian origins. Presented yesterday during the inauguration of her of her "Any War Any Enemy". Curated by Silvia Burini and Giuseppe Barbieri, opened at CFZ - Ca' Foscari in Dorsoduro.
The work includes murals, engravings, monitor and an installation. “Any War Any Enemy” is an ideal continuation of a previous project presented by Lena Herzog at the Art Biennale of 2022, which had also included a projection in the courtyard of Ca' Foscari, for The Art Night. But if the previous project was dedicated to the extinction of languages, this time it's about the extinction of the entire planet, in the imminence of a possible and a catastrophic nuclear war.
CULTURA & SPETTACOLI
Lena Herzog: “At the edge of the abyss unconcerned”
by Giuseppe Ghigi
April 21, 2024
An American photographer, conceptual multidisciplinary artist of Russian origin, Lena Herzog presented at the Bottega Cini of Venice a monograph dedicated to her artistic journey written by two Ca' Foscari University professors: Silvia Burini and Giuseppe Barbieri. Wife of the German director Werner Herzog, Lena is now at home in Venice: two years ago she was at the Art Biennale with “Last Whispers”, sort of catalog of languages at risk in the world as the end of communication between people, and now she's back with the exhibition “Any War Any Enemy” at Cultural Flow Zone of Ca' Foscari at as part of the “Crossroads of Civilizations” festival of humanities.
REACTIONS TO LAST WHISPERS:
"A very haunting and singular experience.”
—Alex Ross
music critic for The New Yorker magazine
and author of The Rest Is Noise
“I've experienced this extraordinary work and I am still overwhelmed by it. When I was immersed in the work—I disappeared."
—Carlo Ginzburg
historian, writer and philosopher, author of
The Cheese and the Worms, The Enigma of Piero, True, False, Fictive etc.
"… an unclassifiable work.
Ms. Herzog approaches this dismal subject in a decidedly poetic, almost abstract way, conveying the aura of all that’s being lost rather than haranguing.
That we don’t see the speakers and can’t know what’s being said is the point of this austere and poignant Babel. The musical landscape is sometimes gentle, sometimes aggressive, but it always keeps our attention on the rich, incomprehensible, often overlapping chorus of words.”
—Zachary Woolfe,
The New York Times
"I sat back and … lost myself. I loved it. ... what I loved most was the conceit, and I mean conceit in the way Samuel Johnson meant, in other words, what I’m talking about here is the strategy. The work didn’t say, “Now, listen up folks. You really have to do something about the languages that are dying out all over our planet.” Whispers did something far superior. It gave us some languages (some spoken and some sung) and it asked us simply to immerse and lose ourselves in them. And by the time that process was over, 46 minutes later, it had won the argument (without raising its voice). Once you’ve heard these words, the words in this film, that are spoken by marginal peoples from all over the world, you know these languages must be nurtured and nourished and cherished and that that position is non-negotiable. Whispers put the case and collapsed the opposition. Game over as my children would say. Now that’s quite something to pull off in 45 or 46 minutes. A magnificent achievement and a magnificent work."
—Carlo Gébler,
Irish poet, playwright and novelist
CULTURA
How Many Languages Are in Danger: Lena Herzog’s Show in Venice
by Annachiara Sacchi
May 13, 2022
Visori e cuffie, per osservare e ascoltare, un’ultima volta. Per immergersi in un’esperienza di ascolto che presto svanirà nel silenzio. Per essere testimoni di un processo di estinzione di massa, quello delle lingue. Ogni due settimane il mondo perde un idioma, ne usiamo circa trenta su settemila esistenti, di cui almeno la metà si perderà entro la fine del secolo, se non prima.
Lena Herzog’s Project Against the Extinction of Languages in Venice
by Valerio Veneruso
April 23, 2022
"LAST WHISPERS" IS THE AMBITIOUS PROJECT THAT LENA HERZOG PRESENTED IN VENICE DURING THE OPENING DAYS OF THE BIENNALE. STRUCTURED IN DIFFERENT PHASES, THE WORK USES VIRTUAL REALITY TO EXPLORE A VERY IMPORTANT PROBLEM, BUT ABOUT WHICH WE TALK TOO LITTLE: THE RAPID DISAPPEARANCE OF LANGUAGES AND DIALECTS FROM ALL OVER THE WORLD. WE INTERVIEWED THE ARTIST
"Language is the first creative act of each of us". With these words as simple as they are full of meaning, Lena Herzog (1970) revealed to the Venetian public the heart of what is perhaps her most ambitious artistic project.
MUSIC SECTION:
Dying Languages Cry Out in Last Whispers
by Zachary Woolfe
October 11, 2019
"… an unclassifiable work.
Ms. Herzog approaches this dismal subject in a decidedly poetic, almost abstract way, conveying the aura of all that’s being lost rather than haranguing.
That we don’t see the speakers and can’t know what’s being said is the point of this austere and poignant Babel. The musical landscape is sometimes gentle, sometimes aggressive, but it always keeps our attention on the rich, incomprehensible, often overlapping chorus of words.”
—Zachary Woolfe
Lena Herzog : “I listened to these voices, their musicality, their humanity”
MUSIC / INTERVIEW
by Pierre Gervasoni
September 7, 2019
Avec « Last Whispers », création audiovisuelle sur les langues menacées de disparition, la photographe met en images des enregistrements autochtones. Un oratorio cosmique.
MUSIC SECTION:
“A Language Is a Sense of Self”
MUSIC / INTERVIEW
by Herve Pons
September Issue, 2019
L’artiste plasticienne et photographe LENA HERZOG cree avec Last Whispers un oratorio immersif melant film video et composition sonore et musicale. Un chant pour les langues qui s'eteignent et se meurent.
THE SMART SET
Still Alive
IDLE CHATTER
By Morgan Meis
May 18, 2015
Why photograph Theo Jansen's kinetic sculptures, the Strandbeests? Well, why photograph anything alive?
“And that is exactly what Lena Herzog has done, quite movingly, with the beach beasts of Theo Jansen. She’s photographed them as you would photograph a beloved friend or a dog that you’ve lived with for many years. Herzog’s photographs are not so much acts of documentation as acts of tenderness.”
BOOK REVIEW of “Lost Souls”
CURIOSITIES / NYTIMES.COM
HOLIDAY BOOKS
By Kathryn Harrison
December 3, 2010
Bullfighting. Flamenco. Religious pilgrimage. On the face of it, little in Lena Herzog’s earlier monographs prepares her audience for LOST SOULS (de.MO design, $54), photographs taken in “cabinets of curiosities,” collections of anatomical specimens dating back to the 17th century. But if the denial of death inspires the making of a photograph, fixing a moment so that it never ends ...
“If her theme is macabre, Herzog’s vision is vigorously redemptive, reanimating flesh with light, surrounding faces with incandescent auras. Even as it exposes them, light seems to emanate from some of the specimens, as if a transubstantiation had occurred; Herzog exalts what Christian church authorities once condemned as an unholy practice, conveying something close to ecstasy. While she cannot pose her subjects, she casts them in blatant religious iconography. Light refracted through liquid splashes halos on faces, and captures one in the attitude of supplication. In these photographs illumination is so pure and radiant it recalls the paintings of Caravaggio, velvety blacks and glowing whites joined in dramatic chiaroscuro.”
By Lawrence Weschler
Back in 1594, in the very heart of the period we will be considering in the pages that follow, Sir Francis Bacon, while prescribing the essential apparatus for “a compleat and consummate Gentleman” in his Gesta Grayorum, suggested that in attempting to achieve “within a small compass a model of the universal made private,” any such would-be magus would almost certainly want to compile “a goodly huge Cabinet, wherein whatsoever the Hand of Man by exquisite Art or Engine, hath made rare in Stuff, Form, or Motion, whatsoever Singularity, Chance and the shuffle of things hath produced, whatsoever Nature hath wrought in things that want Life, and may be kept, shall be sorted and included.”
Lena Herzog Stalks the Strandbeest
By Ian Frazier, Jesse Wender
September 5, 2011
A breathtaking image by Lena Herzog opens Ian Frazier’s story this week on Theo Jansen’s Strandbeests—kinetic sculptures, resembling giant animal skeletons, that can walk on the beach, powered only by the wind.
NEWCITY ART
Permanent Mirror (Review)
By Michael Weinstein
November 6, 2012
In a remarkable project that fuses Ripley’s Believe It or Not with hardcore existentialism, Lena Herzog undertakes an extensive black-and-white photographic series in which she documents strange and amazing human creations such as the curiosities that Europeans used to put on display in cabinets made for that purpose (“Lost Souls” series), a symphony orchestra composed of mouse skeletons (“Rhapsody in Death”), and the wind-powered “beach animals” constructed by Theo Jansen that roam around the shoreline in the Netherlands (“Deus ex Machina”).
BLACK & WHITE PHOTOGRAPHY
LENA HERZOG. From Dance Floor to Bullring.
By Tracy Hallett
February 2004, Issue No. 30
“I am influenced by Weegee and Diane Arbus, but recently I went to see an exhibition by August Sander and it completely blew me away," she enthuses. "His images stay with you - they stay in your spine. With Diane Arbus, the impact is immediate, but with Sander the layers take longer to come through. You rarely see this, even in painting - with Sander the more you see, the more you get it.”
BRITISH JOURNAL OF PHOTOGRAPHY
Spanish Eyes. Interview.
By Dawn Sumner
December 12-31, 2003
"It feels as though I have been an outsider all my life, but for me it is not a sad thing, it is a good thing because I think my senses are sharper somehow, and it is a good thing to live an examined life if circumstances make you evaluate it more intensely. Being an immigrant, has given me a certain alertness."
LENA HERZOG: “Bullfighting is a Metaphor for Civilization. A triumph of men over beasts.”
By Juan Maria Rodriguez
April 30, 2002
"My father, who is a scientist had a huge library. Books of all sorts ... a lot on philosophy ... In this library there were also art books, the Caprichos and the Tauromaquia by Goya among them ...now, ...each time I come to Spain I go to the Prado to see the originals. The period of Goya that is called oscuro ("dark") does not seem dark to me at all, it is beautiful, ingenious."
The Apocryphal Look
By Andrew Marin Cejudo
April 16, 2002
"Lena Herzog first found the world of bullfighting through the gravures of Goya, which is the best way to enter it with a clear head and dark shadows. She recreated the image of a tragic and deadly spectacle.
"With her Leica as an analytical eye Herzog came into the world of bullfighting like an apocryphal with the distance and yet a clarity of insight..."
"The result [of her work] is an original look at the mystical moments in bullfighting. Even though she is a foreigner to the tradition she dominates it and finds in it a distinct point of view."
LENA HERZOG: "Seville for Bullfighting is like La Scala for the Opera"
By Alberto Garcia Reyes
April 16, 2002
"Seville for bullfighting is like La Scala for the opera.
What captured me about the bullfight was its mystery, the mixture of joy and sadness that envelop the toreros." (Lena Herzog)
"She is a humanist whose photographs are a precise chronicle of the passion of bullfighting, said Ignacio de Cossío ."
Russian Photographer Lena Herzog Shows the Emotion of the Bullfight
By Margo Molina
Published on April 19, 2002
"What interests me most about corrida is suspense" (Lena Herzog)
"She was six when she picked up a book of Los Caprichos by Goya and became fascinated with tauromaquia. In 1997 the photographer was confronted with the "beauty, the horror, the grandeur and the crudeness" in the bullfight arena of Seville for the first time. Since then, for 32 afternoons she went to the arena with her camera in hand.
"... she does not photograph the celebrity bullfighters ... what interests her is this world, the sensibility, the intensity of the stares of the protagonists of the fiesta."
"The suspense is what always interested me most about the bullfight. The ritual is preordained, but the outcome isn't. When one overcomes the natural fear of being in front of a bull, one has to feel a sensation of great freedom, which is what we search for so intensely. People demand a hero, so that they can associate themselves with him."
EXPRESS, USA:
Over There
By Lindsey Westbrook
Published on January 5, 2001
"Below Zero is a group of black-and-white photos of Vienna taken by Herzog over the last few winters. She uses a different technique for shooting and developing each one, always capturing a different effect of the cold - and proving that she is definitely a master of her medium.
... all of Herzog's pictures have an intangible foreignness to them like an old black-and-white European art film. It's something to do with the quality of light, the starkness of the sky, the graininess of the print ..."