At the center of The Chess Game is the Austrian-born queen of France Marie Antoinette. She appears colorfully and lightly dressed, with a striking hat by her milliner and dressmaker, Rose Bertin, who is likewise represented as a character on the board. Marie Antoinette’s mother, Empress Maria Theresia, joins the ensemble next to her. Further figures include the artist Egon Schiele, shown with a mask protecting him against the Spanish flu; the Habsburg heir to the throne who was assassinated in Sarajevo, Franz Ferdinand, with mustache and hunting rifle; Ferdinand I, king of Lombardy-Venetia in the nineteenth century; Theodor Herzl, the founder of Zionism; Sigmund Freud; and other historical notables. Appearing in the back of the chessboard is Aribert Heim, a figure of key importance for Boghiguian. Heim — like most of the people depicted here, of Austrian origin — was the camp physician at the Mauthausen concentration camp and known among the prisoners as “Dr. Death”. After the war, he spent several years in Germany before fleeing to Egypt, where he lived undisturbed in a hotel in Cairo until his death. For her solo show in Bregenz, Boghiguian expanded the chess ensemble: nine figures now float above the chessboard, including Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Leo Tolstoi, Rudolf Steiner, Stefan Zweig, Friedrich Nietzsche, and Josephine Baker.
The Chess Game, 2022
mixed media installation
Mixed media installation
Installation views: Kunsthaus Bregenz, 2022
Fotos: Markus Tretter
Text by Kunsthaus Bregenz 2022
Anna Boghiguian
Anna Boghiguian was born in Cairo, Egypt, in 1946 and has Armenian roots. She studied political and social science at the American University of Cairo and holds a BFA in fine arts and music from the Concordia University in Montreal, Canada. Since the early 1970s, her art has emerged from various movements around the globe, translating a nomadic experience and gaze into painting and installation, collages and books. As a traveling artist, she tells of how people and ideas, relationships and goods vary and evolve, sometimes bright and fluid, sometimes bound in inequality and oppression. Boghiguian's broad insight into literature and worlds of thought makes her art a profound source of contemplation. In 2015 Boghiguian received the Golden Lion at the Venice Biennale and in 2024 she will be awarded the 30th Wolfgang-Hahn-Prize of the Society for Modern Art at the Museum Ludwig in Cologne. Her work has been featured in major solo exhibitions around the world, most recently at the Power Plant, Toronto (2023) Kunsthaus Bregenz in Venice (2022), IVAM, Valencia (2021), SMAK, Ghent (2020), Tate St. Ives (2019), the New Museum (2018) and the Museum der Moderne, Salzburg (2018) and in numerous international group shows including the 22nd Sydney Biennale (2020), Castello di Rivoli, Torino (2019), the Museum of Modern Art, New York City (2017) and the dOCUMENTA (13), Kassel (2012).
- Anna Boghiguian
- Candice Breitz
- Marco A. Castillo
- CATPC
- Alice Creischer
- Chto Delat
- Clegg & Guttmann
- Eugenio Dittborn
- Heinrich Dunst
- Anna Ehrenstein
- León Ferrari
- Peter Friedl
- Sophie Gogl
- Barbara Hammer
- Ramon Haze
- Hiwa K
- Simon Lehner
- Renzo Martens
- Chris Martin
- Frédéric Moser & Philippe Schwinger
- Oswald Oberhuber
- Mario Pfeifer
- Dierk Schmidt
- Santiago Sierra
- Michael E. Smith
- Franz Erhard Walther
- Clemens von Wedemeyer
- Tobias Zielony