Courtesy the artist and Hauser & Wirth, Zurich/London

Roni Horn, 2008

Courtesy the artist and Hauser & Wirth, Zurich/London

"You Are the Weather" (detail) (1994-96). 64 C-prints and 36 gelatin-silver prints, each 8 3/8 x 10 3/8 in.

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For more than three decades, Roni Horn has explored the construction and perception of identity through unexpected means such as photographs of bodies of water and aquamarine skies mottled with clouds. Even her more traditional portraiture is transgressive in its conception: rather than photograph people as they are, she might shoot them as who they think they are. Walking into a Roni Horn exhibition is thus a mystical experience: closely cropped images of serene faces gaze at you with startling openness, while clouds and water transmit vast emotional range. In her recent interviews with residents of southwest Iceland, Horn’s second home and the subject of many of her exquisite books, something as simple as talking about the weather becomes an intimate exchange. We spoke with the artist as she prepared for a major retrospective of her work. — LK

What draws you to particular faces and makes you want to photograph them?

I am not so much drawn to particular faces as to how they play in a given conceptual framework. For example, in You Are the Weather, I chose a woman who seemed to hold the potential of expressing something broader than her individual identity — she is a kind of MacGuffin. Here the edit excludes the descriptive — that is, the more nameable expressions that take her away from the essential ambiguity I was after. For Doubt by Water and Becoming a Landscape, I chose a face full of nuance and subtlety. Everything made a difference in his expression, yet the expressive range is deeply compressed. I wanted to get at instances — those moments of seeming inconsequence that add up to essential difference. The edit was finding images that were both identical and different. In Portrait of an Image (with Isabelle Huppert), I needed a face that was both known, in the sense of public, and transparent, in the sense that her face as an anonymous person and her face as an actress are pretty much identical. I asked Huppert to impersonate herself in the various film roles she’s played over the years. The work was a collection of these identities.

You’ve cited Emily Dickinson and Flannery O’Connor as influences. Have visual artists ever influenced you?

Emily Dickinson’s influence is like water — it’s on the level of infrastructure. I never really focused on visual art per se, but from the previous generation or two, David Bowie, Louis I. Kahn, Robert Bresson, and Godard were important to me. Agnes Martin, Vija Celmins, Blinky Palermo, Philip Guston, and Gerhard Richter were, as well.

Your work can be said to possess a cinematic quality in the way it isolates and serially presents images. It also brings to mind the work of Tarkovsky in his use of landscape as an emotional mirror. If you were to work in film, what might you make?

Tarkovsky is an interesting reference. My works Pi and Becoming a Landscape, Doubt by Water, and To Place all employ nature as mirror. But the film I think about making is more a self-portrait based on eyewitness accounts. The witness becomes the portraitist. And I imagine the me(s) will be as numerous as the witnesses.

You create indexes of things — taxidermied birds, faces, Iceland. Is it possible to think of this show, the largest survey of your work to date, as an index of you?

Yes. It is an index of me, but only at the moment.

What’s the weather like right now?

3:45 pm. Here in New York, it is balmy and murky. It’s winter and too mild for comfort. You could say it’s sultry, but the tepid version.

"Roni Horn A.K.A. Roni Horn," Feb. 25-May 25, Tate Modern, London, tate.org.uk. The show will travel to the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, in Nov.

"Roni Horn" originally appeared in the February 2009 issue of Modern Painters. For a complete list of articles from this issue available on ARTINFO, see Modern Painters' February 2009 Table of Contents.