Exhibitions views from Anaïs Horn, Talk to Me, Fotohof Salzburg, 2025. 

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Anaïs Horn’s project expands her ongoing investigation into the spectral presence of objects

and spaces, drawing direct influence from Hervé Guibert’s L’Image fantôme

(1981). In this seminal text, Guibert explores the elusive nature of photography — its ability

to preserve and betray, to animate and annihilate — an inquiry that deeply resonates with

Horn’s engagement with intimacy, absence, memory, and the unseen.

“I feel completely empty now that I’ve told you this story. It’s my secret. Do you understand?”

Secrets, as Guibert writes, have to circulate. In Talk to Me, Horn stages this perpetual

exchange through layered interventions. Using personal, archival and found materials,

she manifests the installation as a site of tension between revelation and concealment:

oversized silvered Cimaruta amulets, historically worn as protection against the evil eye,

form a wall-bound constellation; large scale black-and-white photos of interiors of

family and friends’ homes, taken by Horn’s grandfather in the 1960s, reappear as mirrors

with Horn herself intervening as a spectral figure, entering the photographic space, appearing,

dissolving, merging with forgotten places.

Archival still lifes staging her grandmother’s jewelry function as palimpsests of personal

and photographic lineage. She reworks these images through hand-coloring and erasures,

layering traces of presence and loss.

A reconstructed crime scene — echoing the burglary where her grandmothers’ bequeathed

jewelry was stolen — transforms into a sonic body, embedded with exciters that transmit

electromagnetic recordings from her childhood home. These recordings reference EVP

(electronic voice phenomenon), layered with a ticking watch and the solitary sound of an

old, empty jewelry box playing. Together, they become an acoustic evocation of both

absence and presence.

“Photography is also an act of love.” Like Guibert, Horn’s work is an act of devotion to what

disappears. Mirrors punctuate the space, amplifying the work’s preoccupation with protection,

superstition, and the instability of images.

Through performative, sonic, and material gestures, she constructs a liminal space between

past and present, the visible and the invisible, where memory flickers, where secrets, like

images, resist finality — always circulating, always in transit.

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Photography: Rainer Iglar, Fotohof