‘There’s nothing funny about a clown in the moonlight,’ remarked Lon Chaney, horror’s silent-film star. And indeed the trope of the sinister clown, dulled by a century of increasingly maudlin cameos in popular culture, has in the hands of Anne Imhof acquired new potency befit- ting the suffusive pall of the present moment. The hands in question belong more precisely to artist Eliza Douglas, Imhof’s collaborator and partner: in a culminating passage from last year’s performance Natures Mortes at Paris’s Palais de Tokyo, a young man in a ‘killer clown’ T-shirt of the sort favoured by nu-metalheads leans against a bank of lockers flanking a wall as a shirtless Douglas approaches from behind. With the steely gaze of a hallway bully (another cinema trope that has taken on new and sickening implications in recent years), she grabs him by the collar and drags him to the centre of the gallery; kneeling, facing front, before him, she pulls his shirt out from his chest and over her own head. The performer, her face now masked by the grimacing clown, pauses to unfurl her fingers in a slow wave . . .