ANOHNI
B. 1971
ANOHNI, born 1971 in Chichester, West Sussex is an English artist, composer and musician, known as the lead singer of the band Antony and the Johnsons. The artist’s body of work includes drawing, collage, video, and sculpture alongside critically acclaimed music, both marked by intuitive and accumulative practices that reflect a shared visual and psychological vocabulary.
ANOHNI has had solo exhibitions at The Kitchen, New York (2019); Nikolaj Kunsthal, Copenhagen (2018); Kunsthal Bielefeld, Germany (2016); and the Hammer Museum, Los Angeles, CA (2012). Her work has been presented in numerous exhibitions including Living Rooms at the Louvre, Paris (2013) and The Cut at Sikkema Jenkins & Co. (2013). In 2014, ANOHNI staged FUTURE FEMINISM, an exhibition and performance series at The Hole in New York, NY, in collaboration with Kembra Pfahler, Johanna Constantine, Bianca Casady, and Sierra Casady. As artist-in-residence at Aarhus European Capital of Culture in 2017, Anohni restaged FUTURE FEMINISM and presented a 5-channel video work SILENT HOPELESNESS. ANOHNI has curated exhibitions and group show as Agnes B. Gallery, Paris and at Participant Inc., New York, NY.
In 1997, the New York Foundation for the Arts awarded ANOHNI a Fellowship in the Performance Art/Emergent Forms category and in 2015, inducted the artist into its Hall of Fame. Antony and the Johnsons received the UK’s Mercury Prize in 2005 for their album “I am a Bird Now,” also named Album of the Year by Mojo Magazine. MoMA presented Antony and the Johnsons at a special staging at Radio City Music Hall in 2012. ANOHNI's album HOPELESSNESS was named in the New York Times' and The Guardian’s top ten for 2017 and was nominated for the UK Mercury prize and a Brit. ANOHNI and J. Ralph’s song "Manta Ray” was released as the lead single from the soundtrack for the 2015 documentary Racing Extinction and nominated for an Academy Award for Best Original Song in 2016. ANOHNI has also collaborated with Lou Reed, Laurie Anderson, Yoko Ono, filmmaker Charles Atlas, and Björk.
In 2023, ANOHNI and co-editor Marti Wilkinson collaborated to publish Blacklips: Her Life and Her Many, Many Deaths. This monograph presents an electrifying archive of primary materials and ephemera from the era of the Blacklips Performance Cult, founded in New York City in 1992 by ANOHNI and artists Johanna Constantine and Psychotic Eve. For the next three years, the theatrical collective of downtown artists, drag queens, performers, and nightlife regulars wrote and staged avant-garde performances every week at the Pyramid Club on Avenue A. Their dramatic enactments embodied the radical creativity of the queer underground scene, and the cathartic impulse driven by the ravaging AIDS crisis. The publication of Blacklips: Her Life and Her Many, Many Deaths is accompanied by a compilation LP of original Blacklips recordings, sound montages, and DJ tracks curated by ANOHNI.