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ANOHNI Holland Festival associate artist in 2023

press release 10 October 2022 

The associate artist for the 2023 edition of the Holland Festival is singer, composer and visual artist ANOHNI. The festival will feature both new and existing work by the associate artist. 


About her role as an associate artist 
More than taking the stage herself, ANOHNI sees her role as associate artist as an intermediary: 
‘I am excited to work with Holland Festival in 2023 because it allows me to put forward, not just as an artist but also with my curatorial input, questions central to my work: What is Really Happening? Can we imagine a change in our trajectory, utilizing more feminine, less patriarchal systems of governance? Can we as Europeans recognize that our legacies of global conquest, enslavement and resource extraction have driven the earth to a breaking point, and can we each find the humility within ourselves to ask for help? As an artist I have explored the emotional, psychological, and spiritual ramifications of our proximity to ecological collapse. I try to inhale the weight of the cataclysm that we are authoring. Embrace the discomfort. Let’s be brave and make space within our imaginations for the empirical global realities that we now face. Let's reach towards those among us who have knowledge of a more symbiotic relationship with the rest of the natural world, and ask for their guidance and leadership.’  

Holland Festival director Emily Ansenk: 
‘2023 will be the Holland Festival’s fifth year of collaborating with one or two associate artists on part of the festival programme. Each year, this collaboration brings interesting new themes and perspectives to the festival. We are having inspiring conversations with ANOHNI and are very much looking forward to bringing her work and the work of artists she admires to Amsterdam.’  

Previously at the Holland Festival 
ANOHNI was featured in the Holland Festival three times previously. In 2009, she made a unique orchestral programme together with the Metropole Orkest that included songs from the album The Crying Light. In 2012, she appeared in The Life and Death of Marina Abramović by Robert Wilson and performed the project Cut the World with the Metropole Orkest.  

ANOHNI is an English born/American-based musician, artist, and theatre director.  
She first performed at the Pyramid Club in New York City as a young adult, and founded her performance group The Johnsons in 1995. ANOHNI was awarded the UK’s Mercury Prize for her album I am a Bird Now in 2005. Her 2008 album The Crying Light was described by the LA Times as "the most personal environmentalist statement possible, making an unforeseen connection between queer culture's identity politics and the green movement." MoMA presented her performance Swanlights at Radio City Music Hall in 2012, an event described by The New York Times as “Cries from the heart, crashing like waves.” With her group Antony and the Johnsons, ANOHNI performed with symphonies and in opera houses around the world including Sydney Opera House, Royal Opera House London, Teatro Real in Madrid and Carnegie Hall in New York.  
In 2016 ANOHNI released the starkly political electronic album HOPELESSNESS in collaboration with Hudson Mohawke and Daniel Lopatin, addressing “the constellation of systemic brokenness across many aspects of our societies that is now culminating in ecocide.” The single 4 Degrees was released on the eve of the United Nations Climate Change Conference in Paris, and the album was included in 2017 top ten lists of The Guardian and The New York Times. ANOHNI was nominated for an Oscar in 2016 for her co-composition and performance of Manta Ray, a song addressing collapsing life systems in the world’s oceans.  
ANOHNI has presented exhibitions of her visual work at Nikolaj Kunsthal, Kunsthalle Bielefeld, The Hammer Museum, The Kitchen, and Sikemma Jenkins Gallery in New York. She was co-facilitator of the art project FUTURE FEMINISM, which was presented at The Hole, New York in 2014 and as part of ANOHNI’s artistic residence in Aarhus Denmark, 2017 European Capitol of Culture. 

Since 2019, the Holland Festival has collaborated with one or two associate artists each year. In addition to their work, the festival puts the spotlight on themes relevant to them, as well as on related artists. Apart from this programme involving and surrounding the associate artists, the Holland Festival features work from other notable and relevant artists. Previous associate artists were Angélique Kidjo and Nicolas Stemann in 2022, Gisèle Vienne and Ryuichi Sakamoto in 2021, Bill T. Jones in 2020 and Faustin Linyekula and William Kentridge in 2019.  

The 76th edition of the Holland Festival will take place in June 2023.  

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For information and photos, please contact Zuwena Venhuis, press coordinator email: [email protected] or mobile +31 6 48333216