MARIANNA SIMNETT Circus

At the Secession, Marianna Simnett’s multimedia exhibition Circus brings together light, sound, and sculptural works that draw on personal history and cultural memory. References to her Yugoslav heritage intersect with elements of folklore, including ambivalent female figures who appear as both threat and protector, as well as motifs of concealment and exposure embodied in the traditional Balkan skirt. The exhibition unfolds through shifting theatrical situations—spinning forms that evoke a circus tent, staged performances, disorienting laughter, and stark lighting—creating an immersive environment in which attraction and unease coexist.

Central to Simnett’s practice is an engagement with extreme bodily states such as fainting, urination, and involuntary laughter, explored as sites where pleasure and pain converge. Works like Fountain (2026) and Catherine Wheel (2026) transform these experiences into sensory encounters: neon light becomes intrusive and confrontational, while a rotating illuminated skirt, paired with strained, relentless laughter, exerts both psychological and physical pressure on the viewer. The absence of the body in these works is crucial—its presence is instead felt through rhythm, sound, and movement, producing a ghostlike, anthropomorphic effect that resists traditional representation.

This strategy extends to Faint with Light (2016), where pulsing LED light follows the artist’s breathing as she repeatedly loses and regains consciousness. The work resonates with both personal and historical narratives, including her grandfather’s survival of the Holocaust and the long-standing medicalization and objectification of fainting women. By removing the visible body while intensifying its physiological impact, Simnett shifts fainting from a spectacle to an active force that destabilizes perception itself. Across the exhibition, surreal imagery, repetition, and sensory overload function not as escape but as a means of confronting trauma—recasting it as an embodied, unresolved condition that continuously shapes experience.