Anaïs Horn

Job title: Artist
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What made you decide to study Information Design?

Shortly after my Matura, a friend of my parents moved to Frankfurt to develop the corporate design for a start-up there. I wanted to leave Graz and started working there as his assistant. A few months later, I moved to Berlin, where I worked for a graphic design agency for a while. I liked the design work and wanted to deepen my knowledge, so studying information design in my hometown of Graz was the obvious choice.

What do you remember most about your time as a student?

I met my fellow student Alex Nussbaumer right in my first photography class. Since then we have been friends and we still work together. With our project "Fondazione Europa", we now look after international clients in the art and culture sector. The unfortunately too short time with Jörg Schlick as an art professor was formative and still makes me proud today. I also found it important that we were taught a lot of theory because at first I was concerned that a University of Applied Sciences could not offer me the academic depth important to me.

What happened after you graduated?

I worked part-time from the beginning of my studies: on the one hand, I edited the monothematic, multi-perspective magazine BOB in a collective with different backgrounds, and on the other hand, I designed books and exhibitions for the graphic designer Alexander Kada. He gave me a lot of responsibility back then, which helped me grow quickly into a management position later on. At the end of my studies, I did an Erasmus stay in Berlin, again with a focus on magazine design and photography. It was clear that I wanted to stay in print and that photography also had to play a role. After graduating, I applied to the editor-in-chief of the women's magazine "Wienerin". Shortly afterwards I started as a graphic designer there, and within a month I rose to become creative director, first for the Wienerin, then for other women's titles of the Styria publishing house, such as the fashion magazine Diva and the interior magazine Diva Wohnen.

How long were you creative director at Styria Publishing?

Too long! The job was very exciting at the beginning, I travelled a lot for shoots and the Fashion Weeks and also wrote travel reports on the side for a while. But the fascination with the fashion world wore off, and after a short time I started working on projects in the art and culture sector on the side - together with Alex Nussbaumer. I was also increasingly interested in my own artistic work, so in 2013 I applied to the Friedl Kubelka School of Artistic Photography, and after I was admitted, I went on part-time educational leave. After graduating and having my first exhibitions in Vienna, I won the Federal Artist Residency at the "Cité Internationale des Arts" in Paris in 2017. Initially, I still commuted to Vienna for the magazines but quickly realised that the concentrated artistic work on self-selected topics fulfils me incomparably more. I quit my job and moved to Paris directly after the residency, where I now live as an independent artist and creative director.

What projects are you working on today?

I still work with Alex Nussbaumer as "Fondazione Europa", e.g. with long-standing clients such as the Viennese performance theatre "brut", whose design and campaigns we have been creating with international photo artists since 2015, or new clients such as the art fair "Liste Art Fair Basel", for which we designed the campaign with AI for the first time this year. We also regularly work on graphic concepts for cinema films, and I occasionally do costume design for a film or a selected fashion shoot. Books are still our absolute passion, besides designing exhibition catalogues and artist’s books for international institutions and publishers, we both founded our own art book publishers: me 2022 in Paris, "Drama Books", together with the Korean creative director Boah Kim. We launched our first publication "Longing Ghosts in Deep Blue Paranoia" at Printed Matter in NYC in 2022. We are currently working on the second publication with two New Yorker artists. The medium of books is also very important for my own practice; since 2020, my own artist's books have been published by DCV, Berlin, Meta/Books, Amsterdam, Drama Books, Paris, and Edition Camera Austria. The latter accompanied my first institutional solo exhibition "Die Hand voller Stunden, so kamst du zu mir" 2021 at Camera Austria, Graz.

So one could say you live as a freelance artist?

Yes, my everyday life has changed a lot in the last few years. Together with my partner Eilert Asmervik, a Norwegian painter and musician, our home base is Paris, but we travel a lot. Last year we spent four months in NYC, where I had a residency at the ISCP (International Study and Curatorial Program), this year we spent more time in Norway and Mexico City for exhibitions, and next year we're going to Rome for a few months with a residency. I have also been working with a gallery in Italy since last year and more recently with a gallery in Mexico City, which helps a lot with the international distribution and marketing of my work. In my artistic practice, I work with photography, moving image, sound, text, drawing, painting, and installation, most recently also with an olfactory intervention. I create intimate, often site-specific installations in which personal narratives - whether autobiographical or reflecting on biographies of historical (female) figures - evolve into more universal reflections. Starting this autumn, I will also be back in Graz once a month: I have taken on a teaching position for photography in the "Art and Design" course at the Styrian University of Education.