Marianna Simnett’s films are tools to expose the hidden violent structures of the world. Skipping between different genres, from cinéma-vérité, to body horror, to West End musical, her games are played out in deadpan seriousness and gleeful humour. 

Intensely crafted imagery and resonating soundtracks are signatures of Simnett’s eccentric storytelling. In the context of Videograms these films test our understanding of sickness, probe conventions and dissect oppressive social norms.

Marianna Simnett lives and works in Berlin. Her interdisciplinary practice includes video, installation, performance, sculpture and drawing. Simnett uses vivid and visceral means to explore the body as a site of transformation. Working with animals, children, organs and often performing herself, Simnett imagines radical new worlds filled with untamed thoughts, strange tales and desires.

Simnett has shown in major museums internationally. Recent solo exhibitions include those at Kunsthalle Zürich (2019), Frans Hals Museum, Haarlem (2019), Institute of Modern Art, Brisbane (2019), the New Museum, New York (2018) and Museum für Moderne Kunst, Frankfurt (2018). She is a joint winner of the Paul Hamlyn Award 2020, and she won the Jerwood /FVU Award in 2015 and was shortlisted for the Jarman Award in 2017.

 

The Bird Game, 20’, 2019. 

‘What is a Crow anyway?
Crows are people that did bad things.’

 The Bird Game is Simnett’s most recent film and departs from her previous focus on the medical realm, shifting attention to the mythological. A wicked trickster crow snares innocent children in an elaborate game and leads them to their deaths. Shot on 16mm film in the opulent grounds of Waddesdon Manor, this film was born out of research into birds’ sleepless migratory behaviour and capitalism’s desire to eliminate the human need for sleep.

Blood, 23’, 2015.

 Blood restages a botched nose operation, originally performed on Freud’s patient, Emma Eckstein. Wilhelm Fliess, an otolaryngologist and collaborator of Freud, believed that the nose was inextricably linked to the genitals, and could be operated on to cure women of menstrual cramps, masturbation, and hysteria.

In Simnett’s retelling, postoperative delirium puts the young heroine Isabel into a surrealist state. She meets her missing nose bones and Lali, a ‘sworn virgin’ from the north of Albania, who has renounced her biological identity and elected, from an early age, to live life as a man. Isabel is on the cusp of puberty and has to come to terms with what womanhood means in this trippy coming-of-age tale.

Blue Roses, 16’, 2015.

Blue Roses, an alias for varicose veins, continues Simnett’s exploration of the body but this time casts herself as a paranoid patient. Moving between an operating theatre, a cockroach laboratory and a blue netherworld representing the interior of a knee, it blends documentary techniques with hallucinatory shifts in setting and character that disrupt our ability to distinguish what is real from what is imagined.

The Needle and the Larynx, 15’, 2016

The Needle and the Larynx documents Simnett undergoing a real, invasive procedure, a Botox injection to lower the pitch of her voice. Simnett hijacks a corrective procedure reserved for men and in doing so confronts the systemic ways in which gender stereotypes are violently upheld.

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