The Birth of Angel Chair

Short Story

Angel Chair is an evolving literary performance piece by Anna Gien. It unfolds from Gien’s original unpublished manuscript I Am Paradise (the working diary for her 2023 novel Paris Rot), a text shaped by dissociation, fragmentation, psychological violence and love, with Paris as a recurring site of desire, circulation, and psychic pressure.

The Split Self

The manuscript hosts an original split from which the piece originated. Rather than embodying the role of the author, the text animates itself through its internal processes, unfolding as a dissociative spectacle in which figures, repetitions, and displacements enter the field of appearance, with Gien becoming one of its manifestations. Girl fragments and split personas are inhabited by other performers, forming an ever evolving psychic tableau vivant.

Seriality, Glamour, and Material Anchors

Angel Chair takes shape through eroticism, alchemy, seriality and glamour. Literature, images, found footage and historical objects and enactment operate together through a fragmentational, excessive technique. Original books, collage manuscript sheets, collages from her studio, notes, and drawings from Gien’s writing practice function as material anchors within the performance. Textual and visual material, circulating between these originals and digital image streams such as Pinterest, operates as a score. The intimate space of self-creation opens itself to the performers as a temporary site of inhabitation and passage, a place they enter and move through.

First Iteration: The Primal Scene

Following a series of intimate readings and performances, a first iteration developed at Wehrmühle OFFSITE on invitation of curator Anna B. Müller was staged around Delacroix’s Liberty Leading the People, a psychic symbol that serves Paris Rot as revolutionary force of an outbreak of an inner truth. This time it was staged around the image of a girl-writer in her room, everything present as if written into life. The floor was covered with original books, manuscript pages, notes, and drawings used in Gien’s writing practice; the walls were layered with Paris, slogans, and fragments, assembling a primal scene of destruction / fantasme originaire, an incubator, from which her creative process once emerged as a form of survival. The women, Gien invited to join her scene, were gathered around her, forming a nymph-like scene of intimacy, eroticism, and inner containment.

Second Iteration: Embodiment and Circulation

A second iteration was commissioned by Contemporary Fine Arts. For this, gien expanded her universe further through continued embodiments of the manuscripts figures and residues of desire staged within the space. This time in reaction to Delacroix Les Femmes d’Alger Gien staged the interior scene as an excessive shopping spree, inspired by the writings of Assia Djebar, Veronica Franco and Anaïs Nin. Anna Gien appeared within the performance as Lily Cole, wearing a red Chanel camellia, continuing an emblem introduced in Flowers for XXX the Emperor and developed as part of an ongoing engagement with Chanel’s symbolic language. Her manuscript was collaged with other writers texts such as Leïla Sebbar and Marie-Therese Cointre, Charles Darwin, Henri Bergson as well as with original texts by the performers.

Garments, Value, and Incorporation

Possession, value and object hood play a central roll in Angel Chair’s inquiry into the girl as currency and psychosexual evocation. Garments enter the performance from outside and become charged through being worn. Their value accrues through proximity, desire, and enactment. After the performance, they remain available for collection. In this way, Angel Chair treats the feminine figures it creates as the artwork and clothing as its medium: value circulates through attachment, visibility, and exchange, as part of the work’s method of incorporation.

Ongoing Process

Angel Chair continues as an ongoing process of incorporation—literary, erotic, and ritualistic—where the narrative persists through repetition, glamour, and return.

Characters that appear within Angel Chair are styled by Sophie Gohla.

Brand collaboration is developed in collaboration with Veronica Dorosheva.

The Long Story

Angel Chair

Angel Chair is an evolving performance piece by Anna Gien. It unfolds from her original unpublished manuscript I Am Paradise, a text shaped by dissociation, fragmentation, psychological violence and love, with Paris as a recurring site of desire, circulation, and psychic pressure.

The Split and the Ensemble

The manuscript hosts an original split from which the work extends. The text becomes alive through the performers inhabiting it: its figures, repetitions, and displacements pass into appearance. Girl fragments and split personas are taken on and carried, forming a showgirl ensemble and a literary girlband.

Seriality, Consumption, Glamour

Angel Chair takes shape through seriality, consumption, and glamour. Literature, image, and objects operate together through a fragmentary, excessive performance technique. Original books, manuscript pages, collages, notes, and drawings from Gien’s writing practice function as material anchors within the performance.

Textual and visual material, circulating between these originals and digital image streams such as Pinterest, operates as a score. The intimate space of writing opens itself as a site of inhabitation and passage: a place entered, moved through, and temporarily occupied.

Naming Angel Chair

The name Angel Chair was proposed by musician and artist Eleni Poulou (ex member of the British punk band The Fall). It emerged from Gien and Poulou’s collaboration with Verena Dengler, who invited Gien to perform Ekstase by Alma Mahler-Werfel, her second collaboration with Dengler after her show at the Secession in Vienna.

Poulou suggested that an artwork should always be named after the two objects closest at hand. In this case, it was the angel wings Gien wore during the performance and the chair Eleni was sitting on. The French word chair, as later discovered, also means “transcendental flesh,” and refers to the throne on which the Pope sits.

The name further alludes to Anna Gien’s book Paris Rot, which revolves around a red comet threatening to destroy Paris and evokes a Miltonian apocalypse. Early collaborators on the project included the musician Labreylien and the writer Sophie Stein.

First Institutional Iteration: Wehrmühle OFFSITE

Following a series of intimate readings and performances, a first institutional iteration of Angel Chair developed at Wehrmühle OFFSITE on invitation of curator Anna B. Müller, who was interested in an intimate work—at a moment when Gien decided to read the 1,000-page manuscript from a hospital in Paris.

Conceived in dialogue with Müller, the performance unfolded as a four-hour reading around the image of a girl-writer in her room, everything present as if written into life. Women Anna knew from her private life were invited to inhabit girl figures from the manuscript, staging Delacroix’s Liberty Leading the People as a backstage revolt, observed and mirrored.

The space was layered with wall clippings of Paris, magazine fragments, motivational slogans, and faded reproductions of French Empire paintings; the floor was covered with books, instruments, and manuscript pages. Stars hung from the ceiling as fragile doubles of girlhood’s other myth—the star as object, desire, and burnable body.

Writing as Performance

All books present were drawn from Gien’s own writing practice. Textual fragments appeared in scattered, diary-like form, speaking of dissociation, splitting, the unreality of beauty, and the violence of becoming.

Anna Gien appeared within the performance not as an authorial center, but as one figure among others, embedded in a looped moment of glamour, writing, and fragile spectacle.

Performers invited to the first iteration included Olga Cerkasova, Labreylien, Emily Pretzsch, Lija Novruzova, Sophie Stein, Charlie Stein, and Maria Klein Araya.

Emblems and Residues

This logic continues in related works. In Flowers for the Emperor, Gien introduced the camellia as a recurring emblem worn as a vintage Chanel flower, referencing imperial devotion and the writings of Veronica Franco. The camellia functions as a portable relic: a sign that migrates across bodies, accumulating erotic, literary, and symbolic charge.

Within Angel Chair, this gesture persists serially, with figures within the work adopting camellias as part of their appearance.

Collage, Score, Circulation

The work operates through a fragmentary collage logic. Textual fragments, literary references, images, poses, and atmospheres are accumulated and recombined. Visual collage materials circulate across the walls as reservoirs of desire and imitation. These materials function as triggers and scores.

Garments and accessories enter the performance from outside—gifts or investments—and become charged with value through being worn. Clothing and ephemera can be collected directly from the performances, continuing the work as residue rather than merchandise. In this way, Angel Chair treats fashion as both medium and memory, embedding brand histories into a literary and erotic economy.

Later Iteration: Contemporary Fine Arts

A later iteration of the piece was commissioned by Contemporary Fine Arts, extending the Delacroix reference through Les Femmes d’Alger, with performers Mara Aiko, Maria Klein Araya, Olga Cerkasova, Anna Gien, Sophie Gohla, Maansi Jain, Lija Novruzova, Anja Rudzinski, and Sophie Stein.

For this iteration, Gien collaged her manuscript with writings by other female writers such as Assia Djebar, Anaïs Nin and Veronica Franco, as well as with original texts by the performers, she invited them to contribute. From the Texts, characters emerged, allowing fictional female characters to develop and transform across versions slipping into one another through repetition, mirroring, and a quiet, bestial undercurrent. Anna Gien appeared within the performance as Lily Cole, an homage to the British model she adores since her Teenage years.

Fashion objects, bags by Dior, Chanel, and Cartier, were staged across the floor like the remains of a shopping spree, echoing scenes from I Am Paradise in which desire, consumption, and self-erasure collapse into one another. These gestures recall the painterly interiors of nineteenth-century Paris and the erotic melancholy of modern life.

The performance included a collaboration with Vestiaire Collective, facilitated by C.P. Seher Agency and Veronika Dorosheva, further folding circulation, resale, and return into the work, where glamour operates less as critique than as ritual.

Lineage and Continuation

Across the scene, gestures accumulated in an excessive yet restrained, manner, evoking the legacy of Valadon to Colette, Carolee Schneemann, Tracey Emin, Marlene Dumas, and surrealist practices in which the female body becomes both medium and apparition, at once authored, consumed, and resistant.

Angel Chair continues as an ongoing process of incorporation, literary, erotic, and ritualistic, where the narrative remains in motion through repetition, glamour, and return.

Characters that appear within Angel Chair are styled by Sophie Gohla.

Artistic collaborations with brands are developed in collaboration with Veronika Dorosheva.