Emerging onto the art scene in the late 1960s, Rebecca Horn (b.1944) was part of a cohort of artists whose work interrogated the structures of institutions that could be found governing not only the art world but society as a whole. Performance art is oftentimes seen as an effective mode to challenge social constructs that are rife throughout hierarchal structures that institutions welcome. An acute focus on the human body was issued to contest the commodification of art objects by centralising on the individual. The human body is a motif with specific resonance for Horn, who was confined to hospitals and sanatoria suffering from severe lung poisoning for much of her early twenties after she worked unprotected with polyester and fibreglass at Hamburg’s Academy of the Arts.