Marianna Simnett shares insights into her conceptual thinking and the creative process behind her exhibition Circus at the Secession, a multimedia exhibition that brought together light, sound, and sculptural works drawing on her Yugoslav heritage. This episode was recorded on 6 March 2026, the day after the opening.
Marianna Simnett
Circus
6.3. – 31.5.2026
Personal references, including a work that was inspired by her Jewish-Croatian grandfather’s experience during the Holocaust, intersect with nods to folkloric bogeywomen, who may interchangeably figure as threat or ally, and the traditional Balkan skirt that stages the delicate play of revealing and concealing intimate body parts. The show’s Circus theme manifests itself in a variety of ways throughout the presentation: in the maniacal spinning of a skirt overhead, alluding to a circus tent; in a stage for a performance; in the sound of torturous laughter; or in dazzling lights illuminating a darkened space.
Simnett’s practice consistently engages with intense corporeal states – urinating, fainting, the sensation of being tickled – which she taps into in an investigation of pleasure and pain. Having grown up in Great Britain as the daughter of a Croatian mother during the Yugoslav Wars, the artist remembers a recurring fantasy of a urinating figure resembling a folkloric female character who lifts her skirt to expose her genitalia to ward off evil spirits. Translated into neon lighting, this figure oscillates between provocation and defence, between abjection and agency. Neon does not merely illuminate; it intrudes. It screams, demands attention, and collapses distance. Building on the legacy of Bruce Nauman’s neon works, light in Simnett’s Fountain (2026) becomes a body in its own right – one that addresses, agitates, and physically affects the viewer. More
Marianna Simnett (b. 1986) is a British-Croatian multidisciplinary artist living and working between Berlin and New York. Her immersive narratives centre around the overlapping and at times incongruous themes of vulnerability, autonomy, control, pain, metamorphosis, and care.
Simnett’s work has been exhibited internationally in solo exhibitions at venues including Secession, Vienna (2026); Max Ernst Museum, Brühl (2026); Société, Berlin (2025, 2022); Hamburger Bahnhof, Berlin (2024); LAS, Berlin (2023); Institute of Modern Art, Brisbane (2019); Kunsthalle Zürich (2019); MMK, Museum für Moderne Kunst, Frankfurt (2018); The New Museum, New York (2018) and Zabludowicz Collection, London (2018). Selected group exhibitions include Chrysalis: The Butterfly Dream, Centre d’Art Contemporain Genève (2023); the 59th Venice Biennale: The Milk of Dreams (2022); Espressioni: The Epilogue, Castello di Rivoli, Turin (2022); and Prize of the Böttcherstraße, Kunsthalle Bremen (2022).
Bettina Spörr is an art historian and has been a curator at the Secession since 2008. During this time, she has developed more than 60 solo exhibitions in close collaboration with artists and collectives of all generations and from across the globe, including exhibitions with Laura Owens, Francis Alÿs, Nicole Eisenman, Ed Ruscha, Lawrence Abu Hamdan, Dominique Gonzalez-Foerster, Carlos Bunga, Christine Sun Kim, Karrabing Film Collective, Delaine Le Bas, Susana Pilar Delahante Matienzo, Francis Offman, June Crespo, Marianna Simnett, and Katherine Hubbard.
Programmed by the board of the Secession.
The Dorotheum is the exclusive sponsor of the Secession Podcast.
Jingle: Hui Ye with an excerpt from Combat of dreams for string quartet and audio feed
(2016, Christine Lavant Quartett) by Alexander J. Eberhard
Audio Editor: Paul Macheck
Executive Producer: Bettina Spörr
