Eliza Douglas is smiling—but nothing feels particularly funny.

What you see is more of an animal grin, the tensed jaw and bared teeth of a creature that is scared or threatened. The eerie expression appears in a two-channel work displayed within a small, bunker-like room that punctuates Anne Imhof’s new solo show at the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam, serving as the crescendo of the German artist’s foreboding new project, “Youth.”

One of this show’s organizers, curator Beatrix Ruf, had been planning the show for Moscow’s Garage Museum; “Youth” was set to open in April there as a co-production between the Garage, the Hartwig Art Foundation of the Netherlands, and the Stedlijk, where it was meant to stop at a later date. Simultaneous shows at Imhof’s galleries, at Buchholz in New York and Spruth Magers London this fall, would serve to amplify Imhof’s voice further.

But plans changed. Imhof and a local team had been shooting new films around Moscow when the war broke out in late February. Two days later, the Garage called off all of its programming. “We all knew there were tanks around Ukraine but many of us believed in the power of diplomacy,” noted Imhof during opening remarks on Thursday, September 29.

Ruf, who had been working with the Garage on strategy and programming, added that the lead-up to the war was a time when she and other art professionals were coming to grips with the “limits of soft power.” The hard power and reality of war slammed the brakes on all that.

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