Series of 25 photographs and a video, 2017–2020.

Artist‘s book, Meta/Books, Amsterdam, 2020.

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The artist's book Je suis malheureuse et heureuse presents Anaïs Horn’s work on French author Anaïs Nin’s early diaries, the “Journal d’enfance“, written at the age of 16 in 1919 – 1920. In its first pages, Nin sets the tone, describing her discovery about her coming of age, her life between 11 and 16: Je suis malheureuse et heureuse. That is the core sentence and title of Anaïs Horn’s project, consisting of 25 intimate portraits of girls between 11 – 18, shot at her studio at the Cité Internationale des Arts in Paris. Exactly 100 years after Nin’s writings, Horn explores the magic and the problems of being a female teenager, the rites of passage, the timeless and the time-specific topics of female coming of age.

 

Besides the portraits, the book will include stills from the video La Boum, which Horn developed with a 15-year-old dancer, original texts and manuscripts dancer, original texts and manuscripts from Anaïs Nin’s journals, diary fragments from American poet and researcher Jackie Wang, texts by Maren Lübbke-Tidow (DE) and Verena Walzl (AT).

 

Je suis malheureuse et heureuse was shortlisted for the Photo-Text Book Award at the photo festival Les rencontres d’Arles 2021 and in the official selection of the 2021 Oslo Fotobokfestival.

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See publication

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Anaïs Nin, Original manuscripts 

(c) UCLA Special Library, Los Angeles