SUB-ISA

Anne Imhof’s exhibition Youth occupied the largest space in the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam, formerly dedicated to showcasing the institution’s permanent collection. The exhibition design comprised an archival display of the scenographic elements previously produced for Imhof, as part of the ongoing, years-long collaboration between Sub and the artist. Various readymades, such as industrial water vats and school lockers, were arranged alongside architectonic structures including glazed partitions in order to produce a labyrinthine environment of narrow passages and enclosed rooms. The design instantiated a choreographed sequence of spaces for visitors to pass through, echoing the exhibition’s conceptualization of contemporary rituals “The power of Youth is also in how it remains a vessel empty enough that one can fill it in with one’s own projections,” writes critic Kate Brown. “The missing bodies, the occasional barrage of sound, the sense of lost time, the search for an exit—all of that echoes with the calamitous feeling of war drumming away in the background.”