On my radar: Anohni’s cultural highlights

The musician and visual artist Anohni was born in Chichester in 1971. She moved to California with her family aged 10 and to Manhattan in 1990 to study experimental theatre at NYU, getting involved in the New York performance scene and later forming Antony and the Johnsons. The band’s self-titled debut album came out in 2000 and their follow-up, I Am a Bird Now, won the Mercury prize in 2005. After a decade-long hiatus, during which she released solo work and was nominated for an Academy Award, the band have reformed as Anohni and the Johnsons. Their sixth album, My Back Was a Bridge for You to Cross, is out now.

1. TV

Arnold (Netflix)

I really like this ingeniously conceived biopic of Arnold Schwarzenegger. He’s such a hoot! There’s a great scene where he’s like: “I used to look in the mirror and see a bit of a droop under my pec, and I thought, ‘Maybe I could get a surgery for that.’ But now I’m in my 70s and I’m just trying to survive. When I look in the mirror I think, ‘What the fuck?’” He had me so deeply when he said that, because that’s how I feel.

2. Music

What’s Going On by Marvin Gaye

This album, which had its 50th anniversary recently, has been such a huge influence on me, the way it summed up over 10 songs all these aspects of global brokenness. Gaye brought forth from a tradition of black American music the gorgeous, world-changing [power] of resilience in the face of untenable circumstances, and introduced a new template for a modern political, environmentally confrontational record. He spoke simple truths in simple language about what was really happening. It’s as if it were written yesterday.

3. Photography

The Price of Peace in Afghanistan by Mads Nissen

In The World Press Photo yearbook 2023, there’s a series of images from Afghanistan [by Danish photographer Mads Nissen]. One shows a group of women covered from head to toe, sitting outside a bread shop in early morning, begging for bread. I’m thinking about the American occupation of Afghanistan over the past two decades and the children – the girls and the gay people especially – who grew up under that occupation with access to the internet and to a dream of potential freedom. And then America pulled out. My question is, what’s happening to all those kids now? How is it that my country just walked away? It’s disgusting.

4. Place

Washington Square Park, Manhattan

For the past 20 years, the police have had a brutal and fascistic presence in Washington Square Park. But since Covid they’ve basically bailed on downtown Manhattan and gone to torment communities in the boroughs. As a result, young people started to gather in really fresh ways. Now kids from all over the city go to Washington Square Park and they’re cross-pollinating. It’s fascinating to go there again. It’s like the way it might have been in the 1960s. It’s the most interesting it’s been since I first came to Manhattan in the early 90s.

5. Art

Evolution of Fearlessness by Lynette Wallworth at the Muziekgebouw, Amsterdam

I saw this installation at the Holland festival and it’s really magic. Wallworth first showed it in 2006. She interviewed refugees from around the world living in Sydney, all women, and collected their stories in a book, where they described the unspeakable traumas they had endured. But in the installation there is no speaking. You see a projection of a woman slowly approaching a glass screen. She places her hand on the screen and you’re invited to do the same, and she just looks at you in silence. It’s really, really beautiful.

6. Hobby

Water observation

I like observing water in different capacities. I’m made of 70% water, and if I get in the bathtub, a thing of 100% of water and I’m 70% water… I like to observe that sometimes. But more importantly, I mean the movement of water, and the oceans. A few days ago it was reported that the North Sea is up to 5C hotter than it should be. This could lead to a mass die-off of fish and shellfish. A lot of people thought waters around the UK and Ireland wouldn’t succumb [to the climate crisis], but they are. If the oceans die, there’s not going to be much in the way of a future for any of us.