Anna Boghiguian
The Procession of Dionysos (2015–17)
Group of Men (2017), pencil, paint, and encaustic on paper, 103.5 × 57 cm, courtesy of the artist
In The Birth of Tragedy (1872), Friedrich Nietzsche famously identified two artistic forces in Greek culture. There is the Apollonian principle of order, legality, and dreams, and there is the Dionysian principle of chaos, instincts, and ecstasy. Tragedy consists in their fusion.
With her unique painterly storytelling, Anna Boghiguian revisits Nietzsche’s ideas and projects them back onto a vast, troubling modernity. In her drawings and installations, she often intertwines groups of anthropomorphic beings, fabulous hybrids, and animals, a huge cast of characters in some shadow play that unrolls for the viewer like a “precinematic” film, as the artist puts it.
Here, gloomy, caricature-like soldiers are plodding to war or to repress some uprising, while others, going in the same direction, snake around one another in constant revelry, as if their movement were an endless carnival parade. Boghiguian explores their tension and interdependence, perhaps also foreshadowing the role Nietzsche’s ideas would play in legitimating violence, especially by the ultraright, in the name of instinct.
Anna Boghiguian (1946, Cairo, Egypt) is an artist working with drawings, paintings, sculptures, texts, and collages, which she frequently combines into large-scale installations dealing with historical and political subjects. She has participated in numerous biennials, such as Documenta 13, Kassel (2012), and the 56th Venice Biennale (2015), where she won the Golden Lion. Solo exhibitions include: Power Plant, Toronto (2023); Castello di Rivoli, Turin (2018); Museum der Moderne Salzburg (2018); Carré d’Art, Nîmes (2016); and New Museum, New York (2014). Boghiguian lives in Cairo.
Mixed-media installation
Courtesy of the artist