Marianna Simnett Turns Vienna’s Secession Into a Blacked-Out Circus of Sound and Threat
At the Secession in Vienna, Croatian British artist Marianna Simnett (b. 1986) has transformed the institution’s basement into a severe, theatrical environment for her new exhibition, Circus. The ceiling, floors, and walls are all pitch black, a setting that strips the circus of its usual brightness and replaces it with something more ambiguous: a space where spectacle and unease sit side by side.
Simnett, best known for films and installations that probe desire, pain, violence, and power, has long used her own body as both subject and instrument. In Circus, she shifts away from the video installations for which she is widely known and instead presents a light, sound, and sculpture exhibition. The opening work, Catherine Wheel (2026), refers both to a firework she loved as a child and to a torture and execution method. A blue spinning reflective skirt suggests a circus tent or a female garment, while the accompanying sound records Simnett being tickled for four hours.
The tickler was Tim Dahl, a musician who plays bass for Lydia Lunch. Simnett said she chose him carefully: he was strong, punk, experienced with sound, and, crucially, “not a creep.” The performance, she explained, allowed him to “play” her like an instrument, producing a wide range of vocal responses from croaks to cackles to speaking in tongues.
That tension between delight and discomfort runs through her work. Simnett said she tries not to moralize, but to show that “nobody is exempt from having perverse pleasures.” For her, looking itself carries a charge of violence, and entertainment often disguises harm beneath bright surfaces and easy pleasure.
The exhibition also extends ideas from earlier works such as The Needle and the Larynx (2016), in which viewers watch her throat being injected with Botox, and Faint with Light (2016), a sound-and-light installation shaped in part by her grandfather’s survival of the Holocaust. Simnett said she has been influenced by Catherine Clément’s Syncope: The Philosophy of Rapture, which reframes fainting as a kind of temporary exit from the world rather than a purely pathological event.
That interest in disappearance is central to her current thinking. Simnett said she wants her body to vanish from the work and to make what she calls “void art,” allowing others to project their own experiences into the space she leaves behind. In that sense, Circus is less a display of spectacle than a study of what spectacle conceals — and what remains when the body steps out of view.
