ROME: German contemporary artist Anne Imhof won the Golden Lion for best National Participation at the Venice’s Biennale on Saturday for her provocative “Faust”, a dark reflection on modern society.

Black-clad performers in low-ceilinged symbolic glass cages writhe around under the transparent floor as visitors walk above them. Jury president Manuel Borja-Villel praised the show, which makes up the entirety of Germany’s pavilion and opened to the public on Saturday, as “a powerful and disturbing installation that poses urgent questions about our time”.

Imhof, born in Giessen in 1978 and based in Frankfurt, shot to fame in Germany in 2013 with her first solo exhibition, a live performance with donkeys and actors hemmed into an invisible enclosure. The 57th Biennale art festival runs in the northern Italian city until Nov 26.

Published in Dawn, May 14th, 2017